Yes, the North Ridge had been a breathtakingly wonderful alpine rock climb for two newish mountain guides hot for adventure and vertical scenery. And yes, we would already have a few stories to tell about how we had crossed that hanging glacier to access the ridge. Since we'd lived through it, we'd be able to brag about padding out there in our sneakers, chopping steps in the firm, tilted ice with a couple of sticks we'd found.

And we'd be able to tell the other new Rainier guides what we had learned about Fred Beckey's guidebooks. There's that business about the approach times to mountains, when you read in a guidebook that such and such trail takes so many hours to travel, and so, being a fit-as-a-fiddle mountain guide, you automatically cut any such times in half in your own planning. We had learned that you just don't want to do that with Beckey's books.

Turns out they were written for hard climbers… perhaps even people harder than us youngsters. We'd learned it the hard way, since we had naively planned (and I use the word loosely) on climbing Stuart, from the parking lot, in a day. And, technically, we had done just that — Stuart in a day, when the aforementioned sun went down. Curtis and I tried to boogie down in the last of the light. We picked the wrong descent gully though, which didn't help our cause much...