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the crater and walked past steam vents to the summit. The volcano was
     alive, they realized, by the strong smell of sulfur and the hissing from the openings
     at the highest point of the Pacific Northwest. The Mazamas obtained their record,
     putting fifty-nine people on the summit. At 4:30, Professor McClure set up his mercurial
     barometer and took several measurements. Later, his figures were computed to an altitude
     of 14,528 feet, which would make Rainier the tallest peak in the contiguous United
     States. The altitude was off, as it turned out—too high by 117 feet.
    Curtis did not allow the party to stay long on top. He knew the snow that had been
     mush on the way up would quickly harden when the sun left it, and also that the way
     down was the most dangerous part of any climb. The exhausted party followed Curtis.
     Just after dusk, two climbers lost their footing and slid, falling quickly toward
     a ledge. They caught themselves before tumbling over a cliff. Curtis went after the
     frightened, scuffed men and led them back to the main group. Just before 10 p.m.,
     all of the climbers collapsed at Camp Muir.
    In the confident afterglow of their success, several Mazamas, including McClure, decided
     to go all the way to Paradise, a drop of five thousand feet, instead of spending the
     night at Camp Muir. Midway through that final descent, McClure hopped up on a rock
     to take in a moonlit view; he knew instantly he had made a mistake. “Don’t come down
     here,” he shouted. It was too late for him. He slipped, and was gone in a whoosh.
     The other climbers said they barely heard a thing. McClure fell hundreds of feet,
     bouncing over sharp rocks. Much later, when the Mazamas found his body, it was bloody,
     broken and perforated with deep wounds from sharp stones.
    The Oregon professor’s demise was the first recorded death on Mount Rainier, and it
     was news across the country. The mountain had become a gentleman’s Everest for a certain
     kind of American adventurer. In the consensus view of the fatality, as later detailed
     in
Harper’s Weekly,
Curtis was not held accountable. He was praised as a brave soul who had not only
     led a historic climb of men and women to the top, but rescued two people on the way
     down. “Mr. Curtis proved the right man in the right place,” one account noted. “A
     better selection could not have been made.” After the climb, the Mazamas made Curtis
     an honorary member, joining John Muir and a few other notables. And they became appreciative
     fans of his outdoor photography, which Curtis advertised in a small brochure, “Scenic
     Washington.” (Sample offering: “A panoramic view of Rainier, framed, ready for hanging—$25.”)
     Within a year, the club boasted, “We now have the finest collection of Rainier views
     in existence.”
     
    Back at Camp Muir, Curtis tried to explain the quirks of the volcano to the men from
     the East he had rescued. The mountain has its own weather system, he said. In the
     summer, the radiant glow of the sun off the snow is so intense it burns the skin even
     inside the nostrils. In the winter, up to ninety feet of snow can fall in a single
     season. At dusk, the pyramidal shadow of the peak stretches to the crest of the Cascades.
     At the top of Rainier, well below the surface, is a lake—melted water from the heat
     that pushes up the nearly three-mile-long throat of the mountain. And the Indians,
     who had called the peak
Takhoma,
never climbed it beyond the snowfields above the timberline. Only a fool or a Boston
     Man would try such a thing.
    The climber most fascinated by Indians was a man who introduced himself as Bird Grinnell.
That Grinnell?
Yes, George Bird Grinnell, founder of the Audubon Society, editor of
Forest and Stream
and considered the world’s foremost expert on Plains Indians. He traced his ancestry
     to the
Mayflower.
He knew George Armstrong Custer long before the yellow-haired officer became an impetuous