Man vs. Mountain

After eight hours in the black-and-white world above Mount Rainier’s tree line, where even in August all about was snow and rock, Hazard Stevens stared down into the crevasse separating him from the mountain’s 14,410-foot summit. Twenty feet across, immeasurably deep, the chasm gleamed emerald green all the way down.

It was high summer, 1870. In recent decades, mountaineers had summited Baker, Hood, Shasta, and every other volcano punctuating the Cascade Range from the Canadian border to Northern California—except the tallest: Rainier. The seismic giant had humbled half a dozen climbers. All were more experienced than Stevens, who to this point had ascended nothing higher than the bloodied rolling hills of Petersburg, Virginia, during the Civil War.

Nine days and 90 miles of slogging toward the fifth highest peak in the continental United States had brought Stevens, 28, and his companion, Philemon Beecher Van Trump, 31, to an impasse. With the sun sinking, the wind bitter, and their coats thousands of feet below, the men wrapped themselves in outdated American flags they had packed to plant when they had achieved the peak and contemplated the gap between the summit and themselves. Hazard Stevens reached for his coil of rope and fashioned a noose.

of mountains” for the first time in December 1854, upon arriving in Olympia, Washington, with his mother, Margaret, and three younger sisters. The five had traveled from Narragansett, Rhode Island, to meet paterfamilias Isaac Ingalls Stevens. A decorated veteran of the Mexican War, the senior Stevens had come west months earlier to claim his reward for supporting Franklin Pierce’s successful presidential bid: governorship of the newly formed Washington Territory and an additional appointment as the region’s superintendent of Indian affairs. Olympia was the seat of government for the territory, a wild frontier stretching from the north shore