Tristan Massie climbed up ice cliffs, slept on cold mountainsides and survived a near-deadly climbing accident on July 4 weekend, all in the name of hiking Mount Rainier.
“It’s pretty dangerous, but it’s better to die there than on the interstate,” Massie said.
Tristan Massie has climbed to the peak of several mountains in the U.S., including:
» Half Dome, Calif., 8,842 feet
» Mount Rainier, Wash., 14,410 feet
» Mount Marcy, N.Y., 5,344 feet
» Longs Peak, Colo., 14,259 feet
» Telescope Peak, Calif., 11,049 feet
Massie tends to downplay the dangers of his favorite sport, peak bagging, which is climbing to the summit of a mountain or another high location. In the past seven years, Massie has peaked 16 summits in the U.S., including five this year, sometimes making the long hikes by himself.
The 39-year-old’s interest in peak bagging dates back about 20 years, to a family trip to Yosemite National Park in California. It was there that a teenage Massie got his first taste of peak bagging by hiking up Half Dome.
For a rookie hiker, the dome is no slouch. The National Park Service Web site quotes a 1865 report that said the mountain was “perfectly inaccessible, being probably the only one of the prominent points about the Yosemite which never has been, and never will be, trodden by human foot.”
Today, the smooth mountain surface must be traversed by a series of footholds and cable routes. It’s a 14-mile hike to the peak of the 5,000-foot-tall mountain, but Massie managed to finish.
It would be years before Massie’s interest in peak bagging would resurface. Massie has since graduated from Virginia Tech and earned his master’s degree at the University of Virginia, where he met his wife, Tammy.
In 2002, Massie topped his first peak since the Yosemite trip by hiking up Mount Washington in New Hampshire with Tammy. Famous for its strong, fast winds and dangerous weather, the 6,288-foot mountain still holds a 1934 record for the highest recorded surface wind speed at 231 mph.
Massie has since peak bagged several summits in the U.S., including Mount Rainier, 14,179-foot Mount Shasta in California and 14,443-foot Mount Elbert in Colorado. He makes many of the hikes alone, though some treks require a professional guide.
“When he’s guided I feel comfortable, because they’re doing everything in their power to keep him safe,” Tammy said.
He has reached the summit ofhis favorite mountain, Mount Rainier, twice, including his most recent July 4 weekend excursion. Two guides and five hikers made the dangerous trek up the ice walls and snowy peaks of the mountain.
Massie has a soft spot for Mount Rainier because of its glaciers. It is the most glaciated mountain in the lower 48 states. Massie said he appreciated the natural beauty of the snow-capped, dormant volcano.
It’s also the reason the climb is so treacherous. Some parts of the mountain are simply inaccessible at times.
“You try to minimize the risks by going where it’s least dangerous,” Massie said.
While climbing up a slick glacier, one hiker fell and crashed into the two guides, one of whom was cut in the head by the hiker’s ice ax. The guide would hike back down the mountain, but Massie and the others finished the trip. For Massie, it’s all a part of the process. Sometimes the mountain wins, and he can’t finish either. He nonchalantly recalled his attempt to hike up Mount St. Helens in 2008, when the active volcano was still smoking. “If they expected it to erupt, we wouldn’t have been let on,” Massie said. “But we did have to sign a waiver. It’s unpredictable.”
