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.
