First Successful Ascent of Mt. Rainier, 1870

Description

Hazard Stevens and P.B. Van Trump, assisted by an Indian leader Sluiskin, wrote the first detailed successful ascent of Mt. Rainier on August 17, 1870. Hazard’s report of the hike was first printed in the Atlantic Monthly in 1876 and then republished with a foreword by Edmond S. Meany in 1916. Sluiskin attempted to put off the climbers. “Takhoma”, the Indian name for Mt. Rainier, “was an enchanted mountain, inhabited by an evil spirit, who dwelt in a fiery lake on its summit. No human being could ascend it or even attempt its ascent and survive.” This prediction nearly attested as a fact. Believing they could arrive at the peak and come back on the same day, Stevens and Van Trump left their overlays and blankets, only to find themselves stuck all night in depressing cold. They lived cowered in a volcanic steam hole in an ice cave. “The heat at the orifice was too great to bear for more than an instant, but the steam wet us, the smell of sulfur was nauseating, and the cold was so severe that our clothes, saturated with the steam, froze stiff when turned away from the heated jet.”

Hazard Stevens was a military officer, mountaineer, politician and author. He was given the Medal of Honor for his Union army service in the American Civil War at the Battle of Fort Huger. Hazard Stevens and Philemon Beecher Van Trump made the first detailed successful ascent of Mount Rainier.

He was born in Newport, Rhode Island to Isaac I. Stevens and Margaret Hazard Stevens. His father was the first governor of the modern Washington Territory and the Stevens family settled in Olympia, Washington. The father and son joined in the Union army in the Civil War and served in the 79th New York Volunteer Infantry.
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