Mt Rainier Summit

[Note: photos taken with my point-and-shoot, since I definitely wasn't about to carry an SLR up Rainier for my first time] Trip Report: We went as a group of five, all Mountaineers members, for a Fri/Sat climb on the Disappointment Cleaver route. We hiked up to Camp Muir (10,000 ft) on Friday morning, and spent the afternoon melting snow for the climb + dinner, and then went to bed early at 8pm. I only slept about 2 hours before we had to wake up at 11pm. We started our climb at 12:30, after most of the guide services but that was fine since they gave us something to follow. Crossing the Cathedral Gap it was extremely windy and dust kept blowing in my eyes. The scramble at Disappointment Cleaver was pretty hard to navigate in the dark. We temporarily lost our two person rope team. One of them had stomach problems, so they turned back. We got to the top of the Cleaver (12,400 ft) around sunrise. It was still very windy and cold, and breathing was getting more difficult in the thin air. We traversed north to the edge of the Emmons Glacier, since the normal straight DC route is too broken up this late in the season. From there we started the long, slow climb to the summit, most of the time in line behind other rope teams. We reached the crater at about 8:30am, for an 8-hour climb time. The summit was engulfed in a lenticular cloud, causing white out conditions. There were 40 to 50 mph winds and it was also very cold. We headed across the crater to Columbia Crest, the true summit (14,411 ft), and then started our descent. We got back to the Paradise parking lot around 6pm.