Ellensburg climbers summit five Washington volcanoes in under 4 days

Nick Burson and Marc McPherson weren’t thinking about setting a record the first time they climbed Washington’s five tallest Cascade Range volcanoes in a single trip. They just wanted to see if they could do it.

When they set out earlier this month to repeat the feat, however, there was more at stake. There was a time to beat, a record to reclaim.

The climbing partners from Ellensburg did just that.

Beginning at about 10 p.m. on July 9, Burson and McPherson tore through the series of famed summits in quick succession, climbing Mount Rainier, Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, Mount Baker and Glacier Peak.

There was a lot of up, down and driving around. There wasn’t a lot of sleep. But when they reached the proverbial finish line – the trailhead parking lot for Glacier Peak – they’d set what appears to be the new benchmark for scaling the five peaks in one trip: 3 days, 23 hours and 44 minutes, almost a full day faster than the mark set by two climbers in 2021.

“It blew my mind,” McPherson said. “I had no clue we’d actually be able to pull it off.”

The pair’s achievement, which came without skis or any outside support, has been submitted to the website Fastest Known Time, a digital repository for outdoor speed records. If confirmed, it would be the second record they hold on the site. The other is from their trip last year to summit all 12 Cascade Range volcanoes over 10,000 feet in less than 11 days.

Scaling tall mountains in a hurry is just what these guys do.

Burson, who is 38 and originally from Deer Park, works for the Kittitas County Sheriff’s Office. McPherson, 50, works in the police department at Central Washington University. They’ve been climbing partners for about 15 years.

Their treks up the five volcanoes began with a goal of summiting them in a single summer in 2015. Two years later, they set out to bag each of the peaks in a single trip.

They managed a time of about five days and 15 hours. Burson said that although they weren’t looking to set a record, it seemed that they’d done so by default.

“At that point, we were the first ones we could find that had done it,” he said.

Other climbers apparently took notice. In 2021, Washington mountaineers Trevor Kostanich and Scott Rinckenberger climbed the same five peaks and skied down them in four days and 20 hours, according to the Seattle Times.

The use of skis set the achievement apart from Burson and McPherson’s 2017 trek. But the fact that they’d been beaten gnawed at them a little, and they decided this summer was the time to do something about it.

They made some adjustments. They decided to start with Mount Rainier, a place where they’d burned most of a day in 2017 while waiting until late evening to begin climbing the 14,411 foot peak. And, instead of stopping to boil water on Rainier, they hauled it up in their packs.

Some of the time they gained was lost on the way down when they encountered a 40-foot crevasse. A snow bridge they’d used on the way up had collapsed, forcing them to make a decision – find a different way down or rappel into the fresh hole in the ice and climb out the other side.

Another climbing party that was headed for the summit arrived there at about the same time McPherson and Burson did. They helped them confirm that the crevasse had a bottom, which made rappelling a viable option.

McPherson went first. Using a rope tied to anchor points driven into the snow, he slowly lowered himself to the bottom and then scrambled out the other side. Burson followed, and the trip went on.

That was their biggest obstacle on the trip, other than the heat. Seattle hit 98 degrees the day they climbed Rainier. At Paradise, where they napped before setting out for the summit, the high was in the low 80s.

A few hours after finishing Rainier, they headed for Mount Adams, which they climbed in trailrunning shoes and microspikes. Then, they did Mount St. Helens in shorts.

On Baker, they postholed through soft snow. But they kept up the pace, finishing that climb just after 10:30 p.m. on July 12.

Only one climb was left: Glacier Peak, their favorite of the five.

At that point, Burson knew they could finish the trip in less than four days, but they had to be on the trail to Glacier Peak as soon as possible to squeeze in the 35 mile trek in less than 24 hours.

Instead of sleeping, he drove. In Darrington, he snuck in a quick nap – 45 minutes or so – before finishing the drive to the trailhead.

A little after 3 a.m. on July 13, they started the trek to Glacier. About 11 hours later, they were on the summit.

“It was absolutely gorgeous,” Burson said. “There was nobody else up there, zero wind.”

They wore trail running shoes and microspikes for that one, too, which may earn them some scolding, but it worked for them. They jogged the last few miles of the descent and were back at the truck at 9:49 p.m., the five climbs and some 40,000 feet of elevation gain behind them.

They set up their truckbed camper and made a celebratory dinner – Backpacker’s Pantry fettucine alfredo for Burson, pad Thai for McPherson.

Then came the real reward.

“We slept until about 9 a.m. the next morning,” Burson said. “That felt amazing.”