WASHINGTON: On Shuksan

Mount Shuksan in Washington’s Cascades is a 9,030-ft. mass of snow fields, glaciers, crevasses, waterfalls, rock chimneys (vertical crevices). Mount Rainier is higher (14,408 ft.); Mount Baker is more difficult, less dangerous (although six climbers died on its slopes last year).

For experienced amateurs who like the fun and peril of mountain climbing, Shuksan is just right for a Sunday outing.

On a Shuksan outing last week went three competent climbers: H. Karl Boyer, 28, of Seattle, who fought in the Spanish Civil War; Anne Cedarquist, 22, a chemist who once climbed California’s hazardous Lassen Peak; Faye Plank, 37, a Bremerton librarian. Miss Cedarquist had climbed Rainier twice this year, Boyer once. They expected to be up to Shuksan’s peak and safely down by nightfall.

Roped together, Boyer and Miss Cedarquist got to within 1,000 ft. of the peak. Miss Plank, climbing alone, was several hundred feet below them, when Anne Cedarquist suddenly slipped, plunged past Boyer and over a cliff. He seized the rope, burned his hands as he belayed it around an outcropping rock and stopped the fall. Boyer inched along a narrow ledge, looked over, saw that Miss Cedarquist was badly hurt but for the moment safe—half dangling, half propped on another ledge, above a long snow field and a deep crevasse. He could not pull her up without more help than Faye Plank could give.

Boyer hurried down the mountain to summon aid from Seattle. Through the afternoon, night and next morning, Faye Plank sat alone on a six-inch ledge, fighting sleep and listening to the noisy growl of the waterfalls. She had to watch the rope and hold it jammed in a crevice with her boot heels. Said she: “I could hear Anne down below. At first she was just moaning. But when it got dark she began calling. . . . Night lasted a long time, but the early morning was the worst. . . .” At 10:30 that morning, sleepless Karl Boyer and the rescuers saw Anne Cedarquist waving to them from her icy ledge.

They clambered gingerly to her, strapped her to a stretcher. They secured the stretcher with a long rope which they snubbed to ice axes rammed into the snow. All afternoon six men carried the stretcher while three others paid out the rope, foot by foot, then found another purchase for the axes and eased the stretcher a little farther down the mountain. Barefoot, lest his ironshod boots slip on the rocks, another rescuer climbed to exhausted Faye Plank, got her safely down as well. A doctor at Bellingham discovered that Anne Cedarquist had a punctured lung, a fractured shoulder, severe sunburn from the reflected glare of ice and snow, but, barring complications, would live for another Sunday on Shuksan.