Balancing Risk on Mt. Ranier

In the 1960s, as a volunteer to kill for peace (more or less), most of the fellows I trained with went immediately to Viet Nam. And a lot of them did not come back. Joe Nesselrode (not shown) was one of those.

By luck of the draw I was to be sent to Korea, a more peaceful place where as responsible for a daily strength accounting of the Morning Reports I'd soon learn that we were only seeing about 14 U.S. deaths a week and a portion of those explained by G.I.'s shooting at one another in the DMZ.

In 1966 I traveled from Cameron Station on the East Coast all the way to Seattle to then fly to my Army assignment in Seoul (Detachment 1, 1st DPU).

During the trip West I visited my W&L buddy Christopher Weiss, (W&L '65, d ca 1972) shown above, who was better looking and smarter than I. Mom and Dad often said they wished I'd be more like Chris.

While we swapped stories back in '66, we looked forward. We could not see around the corners waiting ahead.

Waiting. Much too soon Chris had worse luck, ending with a shiny chrome pistol and a gunshot.

Before these catastrophes and while Chris was at work, I met Marie who was giving tours of the Airforce Academy. Marie was and perhaps still is lovely, smart, sweet, kind, and tolerant. Her parents were generous, including me on a ski trip while Major Majors kept a close eye on his daughter and, appropriately, on me.

Marie and I hit it off, for a time. But soon enough my clumsiness, fear of commitment, and plain ignorance made clear that we were headed elsewhere, apart.

My abbreviated visit to Colorado Springs and the Majors' ski trip where I made a fool of my self by getting my pants ripped off on my first try at a ski lift said it was time to move on to Seoul.

Heading towards SeaTac and still having a week before my flight brought me to a campsite on Mt. Ranier I rented a car and started driving. Sam had given me enough leave time to take a week long camping and driving trip around the Olympic Peninsula - a 700 mile loop that included Neah Bay and Port Angeles. And Mount Ranier.

Alone and with no supplies and no equipment it was still possible to sleep outdoors. And appealing.

Building a fire heats up a spot of dirt - once you rake away the hot coals - on which, a few evergreen boughs make a mattress. It was easy to fall asleep.

I had not much camping gear - my kit is shown below.

I also had found a piece of clear plastic that worked ok to stay just damp rather than getting soaked when it rained.

Having collected firewood and stored my plastic and eaten my crackers and fried-egg and beans dinner, there was still time to explore the mountainside.

From the campground you could walk to a cliff edge overlooking a marvelous Mount Ranier glacier. The view I saw - this was in the fall of 1966 - is preserved by the photo I took from the campground.

[Click to enlarge any image]

I had never seen a glacier before and figured it'd be great to take a better look - up close.

The down-path was through a vertical rock wall that one could descend by means of a small natural 3-sided chimney that occurred in the rockface.

Going down was easy. Surely it'd be easy to shinny back up, too, your back against one chimney wall and your feet on the other.

Half-way down the rock chimney the glacier grows bigger and the air temperature drops.

At the bottom of the steep cliff, just visible in the right side of my photo above, I explored the top of the Mt. Ranier glacier.

The glacier was cold, icy, and like military service, not so romantic when you got up close to the real thing and saw its purpose.

It was getting dark.

I looked for the rock chimney but it was hidden by evergreens and not to be found.

The silent air was suddenly much colder. I considered the possibility of freezing to death on the glacier. There were few campers 1500 feet above, and no one would hear a call for help.

The chances of dying looked real enough that I built the small rock cairn shown below. Under the stones and marked by a tiny tree branch I put some of my ID papers and a note explaining what had happened.

Someday someone might find my skeleton. It wouldn't be Chris, and it wouldn't be Marie.

Above: Daniel's memorial rock cairn on Mt. Ranier in 1966.

It was getting dark when finally I found a razorback ridge that seemed to ascend at an angle up and out to the edge of the cliff. It hosted the camping area I sought.

Up the steep slope and gripping my way along the very narrow ridge towards the edge of the cliff I looked for a spot to climb to safety.

There was none.

At the end of the abutment of ridge to rock face there was a gap of about what ? Maybe 5 feet?

Above from the clifftop hung a tree limb that, if I could grab it, would let me swing easily up to the cliff top to safety.

Safety?

I could almost certainly jump out and grab that limb. Right? Maybe it's about what, not even 5 feet. 4 feet? It was getting darker. A glacial wind reached across dirty ice and up the face of the cliff, moving through trees, rocks, and my thin jean-jacket.

An easy jump, right?

Yeah, and there's also a vertical fall of more than 100 feet if I miss the limb, lose my grip, or the limb breaks.

Hang on a minute. Literally. Hang on. To life. Four years later that was my wish for Chris and a lifetime later, for Marie.

But at the moment it was just me, my jean jacket, Mount Ranier, clifftop, jumping, and 100 feet below, waiting, a rubble of ice and a rocky cairn.

In sum, nobody.

The probability of making a successful jump was higher than the jumping distance - maybe 99% or maybe better.

I looked down again and saw myself splashed over my cairn.

Those little cairn-tree branches and my puny pile of dirty-brown glacier rocks would be a mess after the impact of a 155 pound nitwit who's just fallen 100 feet or more.

Not to mention how it would feel - or maybe not feel.

A brief painless sail through the glacier-cold air.

Nearby tree branches going swish, swish, swish, stirred by the air of a passing body, on the way to becoming hair, teeth and eyes scattered over rocks at the edge of the glacier on Mt. Ranier.

I considered the <1% risk and thought some more. I stood atop a razor-thin ridge, bracing myself against a tree trunk.

I thought again, making a careful balanced risk assessment. A balanced-risk calculation feels different when it's your hair, skin, and teeth and your cairn.

That tree limb and safety were close. Just a few feet. No fit 19-year-old would hesitate to leap that distance over easy ground.

This was not easy ground.

The probability of a miss, a broken limb, and a fall was very small, maybe 1% or less.

The result of the fall would, however be expensive, a 100% chance of death.

Did I make the jump?

... ... these dots are giving you time to guess ... ...

... think some more ... ... (connect the dots) ... ...

No.

I didn't jump. I climbed back down, and later that night I froze to death. My dessicated, still-icy body was found by hikers the next spring.

No, no, that's not what happened.

OK I didn't jump. What I did was descend back down to the glacier.

Inching along the rock cliff face, groping in the dusk, suddenly and with a surge of relief, I felt the opening of that rock chimney and the path to the cliff top.

Back on the highway, and getting out of Dodge, the next morning the mountain air was warm. I wore just my white army T-shirt and a pair of khaki trousers.

I put my phone on the hood of my rented car. Using using the camera's delay, I bent time, snapping a photo of a still-nervous young man on his meandering way - somewhere - never thinking that he would stare back at himself half a century later saying "Whew!"

A few days later, flying the "Red Tail" from Seattle to Japan enroute to Seoul offered a final view of the mountain - below.

To consider risk assessment more carefully, multiply the risk, even a small one, by the cost if the bad event occurs - do this a few times before you decide that a "balanced" view of risk means we can be comfortable just ignoring it.

2019 04 04 Poughkeepsie

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