Jack Dolan: Steep, icy and ‘vicious’: How a day of climbing on Mt. Shasta turned deadly
MT. SHASTA, Calif. — The couple from Seattle had a taste for adventure but little alpine experience, so they hired Jillian Webster, a professional mountain guide, to help them climb Mt. Shasta — one of California’s most dramatic peaks.
The trio crawled from their tents partway up the mountain at 2:30 a.m. on June 6 and set out for the summit. Snow and rain had forced climbers to turn back the day before, but that Monday the weather was nearly perfect, so clear one of Webster’s clients remembers looking to the heavens and being awed by the sight of the Milky Way.
With crampons on their boots and ice axes in hand, they spent hours kicking and clawing their way up the snowy route known as Avalanche Gulch. They did not know that, up ahead, an extremely hard, slick layer of ice was waiting for them at the worst possible place, on the steepest section of the climb at about 12,000 feet elevation.
When they reached that stretch, one of Webster’s co-workers from Shasta Mountain Guides, who was a little farther up the slope, shouted down that it was too dangerous and he was turning his clients around, according to Nick Meyers, the U.S. Forest Service’s Lead Climbing Ranger on Mt. Shasta.
The other guide looked away, briefly, and upon turning back, he was horrified to see Webster and her clients sliding down the mountain.
It’s unclear who slipped first, but it happened suddenly. Tied together for safety — a controversial practice called “short roping” — they all were yanked off their feet in an instant and hurtled down the slope with terrifying speed.
One of the clients, a 32-year-old software engineer, remembers his face slamming into the ice and somebody screaming. He tried to self-arrest — a technique he’d practiced days earlier in which a climber digs their ice ax into the snow to act as a brake — but that didn’t work because “it was just an ice field,” said the engineer, who agreed to share details of the tragedy if his
