Spotting the climbers who paid to be guided up Mount Rainier is simple. Just look for two dozen hard-breathing clients and six tanned guides marching uphill in a tight, single line.

Rainier regulars call it the "mule train." But for the mountain's guide service, it is cash on the hoof.

This year, Rainier Mountaineering Inc. marks its 30th summer with exclusive guiding rights on the most popular route up a mountain that sells itself. RMI will likely gross $1.8 million by guiding, training and equipping up to 3,000 paying clients - all of whom would be breaking federal rules if they gave their money to virtually anyone else.

RMI offers no guarantee of summit success; in fact, only about two-thirds of paying clients reach the top in a typical summer. RMI barely advertises. A summit attempt costs $500 per person, not including equipment rental. Fatigued clients who move too slowly on the upper mountain get wrapped in a sleeping bag and staked to the snow, where they wait to be picked up on the way down. Twelve RMI clients have died on the mountain.

Yet, most two-day RMI trips set off at maximum capacity. This year, all the popular summer weekends were completely booked by February. Customers often return - many with friends and relatives, some as often as 10 times. Business increases after fatal accidents. And RMI has never been sued.

"Rainier Mountaineering has, no doubt, the best deal going of any guide service in the country," park ranger Steve Winslow said. "Most guide services don't have that single big peak that says, 'Hey, come climb this.' And RMI is right there."

Behind much of RMI's success is Lou Whittaker, RMI's chief guide and its corporate vice president. In a lifetime of mountain climbing, Whittaker could have sought a guide-service foothold on any peak. Yet he laughs when asked why he chose to spend so much of his life at Mount Rainier.

"Any climber would know why I would pick this one," said Whittaker, who estimates that he has been atop Rainier more than 250 times. "I live here. You're a product of your environment. Rainier is my environment. Why would I go somewhere else?"

Why, indeed. Few skilled climbers manage to scrape even a meager living from the mountains. Those who do typically lead clients to far-off mountain ranges. Rarely can a climber earn a good living and be home by dinner time. Climbers aren't commuters.

But Whittaker is. His home sits on 20 wooded acres just seven miles outside Mount Rainier National Park. The hotel and coffee shop he owns are nearby in Ashford. Posters of Whittaker on the shop's walls bear the corporate symbol of JanSport, one of the three companies he is paid to endorse. Battered mountaineering equipment from past expeditions lines the shelves, which also stock copies of Whittaker's memoirs. Also for sale are shirts and hats adorned with RMI's logo.

Whittaker won't say how much he has earned from a lifetime of mountain climbing.

"I've made a nice living from it, although I didn't in the old days," he said. "In retrospect, I would never have imagined that this would become a full-time business."

Whittaker, it seems, is the only person in Mount Rainier's history who went to the mountaintop and found gold.

The inseparable twins

Lou and Jim Whittaker were born Feb, 10, 1929, in Seattle's Green Lake neighborhood, identical twin sons of an avid outdoorsman. They began hiking in the Cascades at an early age, often going on treks with Scout troops or local mountaineering clubs. In his book "Memoirs of a Mountain Guide," Lou recalled that mountain air relieved the stifling asthma he and Jim suffered in the city.

The inseparable twins first reached the summit of Mount Rainier in 1945, at age 16. In 1951, they were recruited to Mount Rainier by Bill Dunaway, an international ski racer who ran Rainier's guide service.

The Whittakers took over the service in 1952. In those early days, Lou recalled, clients paid $28 for a chance to get atop Rainier. The brothers took turns leading the summit climbs, during which they also had to cook for clients at Camp Muir.

Yet, summit trips were not in big demand, and the twins' income came chiefly from popular, three-hour round trips to the now-vanished ice caves above Paradise.

At the close of the 1955 season, the Whittakers left Rainier to accept higher-paying full-time jobs in the outdoor equipment business. Lou signed on with Osborn & Ulland.

Jim joined Recreational Equipment Inc., now the retail giant known as REI. He started as the co-op's first paid employee and would eventually become its president and chief executive officer, retiring in 1979. When not on his 54-foot sailboat, he lives in Port Townsend.

Both continued to climb Northwest mountains, often taking paying clients with them.

The brothers' lives began to diverge in 1963, the year Jim Whittaker became the first American to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the world's highest peak. Lou was invited to join the Everest expedition, but he stayed behind to open his own sporting goods store in Lakewood's Villa Plaza.

The store was called Whittaker's Chalet. A Tacoma outlet followed in 1967. Lou sealed a no-competition promise with Osborn & Ulland, agreeing to stay out of Seattle if they avoided the Tacoma area.

Enter Jerry Lynch

When Lou was working to open the first Whittaker's Chalet, he needed someone with business savvy to provide cash and local bank connections. Sometimes even Lou Whittaker needs a guide.

He turned to a longtime friend, Tacoma attorney Jerry Lynch, whom he had met during the summer of 1947.

By 1963, Lynch had earned a law degree and opened a practice in Tacoma. In exchange for a 10 percent stake in Whittaker's Chalet, Lynch drew up the papers, secured a loan and put up some cash to help Whittaker get started.

Yet, selling outdoor equipment turned out to be less enjoyable than using it. By the late 1960s, he was getting restless in his shops.

Meanwhile, the popularity of guided climbs up the mountain was growing, in part because of Jim's conquest of Everest. And at Mount Rainier, the business of guiding was about to change.

In 1966, the Rainier National Park Co. farmed out the summer guide service and winter ski-tow operation on a subcontract to Kendall Mountain Inc., led by Jack Melill, who had worked for 10 years at Rainier as a seasonal ranger. Running the guide service was profitable, recalled Melill, now 68 and living in Issaquah. His guides charged $45 for a summit climb, and in their first summer led 477 clients to the top, nearly double the previous year's total of 261.

But losses suffered during the winter at the Paradise ski rope tows erased summer's profits, Melill said. After two winters, his corporation's shareholders voted to get out of Mount Rainier.

"No one ever dreamed it would turn into a million-dollar business," Melill said.

The contract then went to John R. and Evelyn Anderson, who wanted to operate the ski tows but had no experience guiding.

"It was something we were totally unfamiliar with," recalled Evelyn Anderson, now Evelyn Lyng, an Eatonville real estate agent.

But the couple knew a familiar figure: Lou Whittaker. In 1968, the Andersons hired him to manage the summer operation and act as chief guide. That fall, they persuaded Rainier National Park Co. president Paul Sceva to split the guide service from the ski-tow operation. The couple then approached Whittaker and Lynch with an offer to sell.

"They decided they didn't want any part of the guide service and sold it to us," Lynch said. "We weren't out there looking for a business opportunity. It kind of came to us, and we grabbed it."

Whittaker and Lynch bought their inventory of boots, crampons, sleeping bags, ropes and other climbing equipment for $3,000.

Whittaker and Lynch formed Rainier Mountaineering Inc. in late 1968, Lynch as president, Whittaker vice president. Lynch would handle the bookkeeping, untangle the Park Service bureaucracy and pay the bills. Whittaker guided clients to the mountaintop. Their timing was right: Interest in mountain climbing was surging.

"It's when pretty much all outdoor sports started proliferating," Lynch said. "There was considerable growth."

RMI's first summer in business was 1969. In 1972, new concessionaire General Services Inc. announced that it wanted nothing to do with the guide service. Whittaker and Lynch phased out the Whittaker's Chalet branches and made guiding on Rainier their focus.

RMI guided on a year-to-year permit until 1975, when it won its first five-year contract. It won another in 1980 and a seven-year contract after that. RMI is now approaching the third summer of its latest five-year pact, which will last through the summer of 2001. All but the most recent contract gave RMI the exclusive right to guide clients to the summit and offer mountaineering courses on Rainier's high glaciers.

Mount Rainier officials said RMI's early contracts were similar to the deals worked out in other national parks.

"We operated by a different standard," said Bill Larson, who has spent 21 of his 33 years in the National Park Service as a ranger at Mount Rainier. RMI's contract "may have been good 20 years ago, but it was equal or similar to what others were 20 years ago."

One fixture of past concession contracts is a provision that ensured concessionaires earned a financial stake in any buildings they constructed on national park property. Park officials say any such interest RMI might have is chiefly in its wooden shelter, a prefabricated brown eyesore at 10,060-foot Camp Muir that houses clients, guides and supplies.

Laurie Shaffer, chief of operations at the National Park Service concessions program center in Denver, jokes that the wind-scoured box might have "no value whatsoever anymore." Still, anyone who might one day wrestle the guide service concession from RMI would have to argue the shelter's value with Whittaker, not the Park Service.

That would occur only if RMI lost its contract. It hasn't happened in 30 years, in part because concessionaires have long had the right to match the terms of any better offers submitted by competitors.

Don Barger, a regional director with the National Parks and Conservation Association, said the provision was designed to keep experienced operators in the parks. Yet, in practice, it discouraged potential competitors from even bothering to write up a proposal.

"Why would anyone pay somebody several thousand dollars to prepare a bid when you know you're not going to get the bid?" Barger said. "You could never win one."

Larson recalled that park officials saw "very little competition" - fewer than five applicants, he believes - when RMI's contract last came up for bid in 1995. Lynch suspects that just the thickness of the application packet scared away most competitors.

RMI will keep its right to match any competitor's better offer when bids are accepted for the contract that takes effect in 2002.

Still, RMI might face some qualified competition. Since 1997, four other guide services have held temporary permits to take turns guiding clients up the Emmons Glacier, Mount Rainier's second-most popular climbing route.

The Rainier work is a minor sideline for the four other guide services, and their numbers are tiny compared with RMI's. One, Seattle-based Alpine Ascents International, will guide just 36 paying clients on Rainier in all of 1999, director of operations Dawn Beckley said. That's what RMI will do in a day and a half.

Beckley said AAI will "probably put in an application" when RMI's contract expires. But she, like officials at the other guide services, holds little hope of dethroning the mountain king.

"If they're going to keep it as a single concessionaire, then I would imagine that RMI would just continue to have the contract," Beckley said. "If you're comparing apples and apples, there's no other company that has that kind of experience on those routes."

A peak that sells itself

Lynch won't say what RMI spends on advertising for clients, but the amount is "closer to zero than it is any substantial figure." Rainier, he said, practically sells itself. Visitors see the mountain as they fly in and out of Sea-Tac Airport, and stories about it are staples of in-flight magazines and newspaper travel sections.

Whittaker said the view of 14,410-foot Rainier from the window of a descending airplane often chills out-of-state visitors who have signed up for a climb sight unseen.

"A lot of them say, 'Geez, is that what I've signed up for?'" Whittaker said. "They say when they first saw it their heart stopped. They thought, 'Man, I'm biting off an awfully big mountain.' And they are."

But that first bite can be addictive, and RMI sees many repeat customers. Lynch, who has climbed to Rainier's summit more than 80 times, understands the fascination. "People get the fever for it. It's a real challenge. And it's known for that."

Rainier's pull also helps RMI build an extensive list of prospective clients who might want to attempt other peaks. RMI is also one of six guide services on Mount McKinley in Alaska's Denali National Park.

RMI clients also are referred to Summits Adventure Travel, a company operated by Peter Whittaker, Lou's oldest son and a partner in RMI.

Peter Whittaker also operates the Rainier Shuttle, the only service designed exclusively to transport visitors between Sea-Tac Airport and Paradise.

The shuttle stops, not unexpectedly, in Ashford at Lou Whittaker's Bunkhouse Motel & Espresso, which RMI brochures tout as "The place to stop on the way to the top." Shared rooms start at $25 a night per person; private rooms cost up to $90. Peter Whittaker sells and rents climbing equipment in a store next door.

The Whittakers are not required to report what they earn on their side ventures. RMI's earnings reported to national park officials, however, show a healthy business that has steadily grown.

In 1997, the last year for which complete figures were available, RMI took in $1,456,951 by guiding clients to the summit and teaching mountaineering skills. Sales of climbing equipment, T-shirts and other items brought in an additional $68,107.

RMI earned $104,229 more by renting equipment through the guide service's building at Paradise. This summer, a two-day rental of the entire package will cost a climber $89, plus tax.

Seven percent of RMI's gross revenue goes into two accounts from which money is drawn for maintenance and improvements to park buildings that RMI uses. As of Dec. 31, those two accounts held $255,623 accumulated since 1997.

"It's a different name for rent," said Mark Morgan, Mount Rainier's concessions management analyst. RMI gets the use of the first floor of the guide house at Paradise in addition to its shelter, outhouse and stone-walled cookhouse at Camp Muir.

The price RMI charges for its popular two-day summit climb and one-day skills-building session has risen steadily. Yearly increases have averaged 6 percent since 1994, when the cost was $375 per person.

This summer, summit climbers will pay $500, a 7.5 percent increase over last year. Whittaker wanted to charge $515, but the park said no. The price is regulated by Mount Rainier officials like Morgan, who judge it against fees charged by other guide services in national parks.

Morgan said park officials cap RMI's prices because they don't want to make guided climbs unaffordable or so expensive that inexperienced climbers set out on their own. Yet, the price limits frustrate Whittaker, who could easily charge much more, given the high demand. "We're saturated," Whittaker said. "Reservations are coming in twice as fast as last year, and we were full last year."

Customers appear satisfied. Morgan's most recent evaluation of RMI notes that the park received no written complaints from paying clients. And if RMI's customers are content, so is the park. Morgan's evaluations consistently give RMI top marks.

"We're very happy with RMI," he said.

Guide service as family

Maintaining that good feeling is the job of RMI's seasonal staff of roughly 70 people, including 55 mountain guides. Senior guide Joe Horiskey was made a partner in RMI in 1990, the same year as Peter Whittaker.

The guides show a marked loyalty to Whittaker and to one another. Guide Jason Edwards of University Place, who teaches at Stahl Junior High School in Puyallup, has worked summers for RMI since 1981, when he signed on as a novice guide at age 21. Like most RMI guides, he speaks glowingly of Whittaker.

"He's a great guy for putting the whole mountaineering scene in perspective, because he's seen it for so many years," Edwards said. "I can't think of any climbers nowadays that have his stature - not only physical, but also the charisma."

If Whittaker is a father figure, RMI's guide corps seems like a family.

"It's been a ton of camaraderie and support in the guide service," Edwards said. "They've been very accommodating and helpful."

The atmosphere is enhanced by communal living conditions. When not on the mountain, most guides sleep and relax at one of six homes in Ashford owned by Whittaker and Ingrid Widmann, his wife of nearly 23 years.

The buildings are separate from the 20 acres of woods that contain the 1,980-square-foot home the couple built into a hillside in 1977. Lynch lives in Tacoma's Old Town, close to the Dock Street office where RMI keeps a winter staff of five people.

Providing homes for the guides lets RMI pay lower salaries. Whittaker said wages for beginning guides this summer start at $1,200 a month with no health benefits. For that, a novice guide might have to climb Mount Rainier two times a week.

Guides are expected to know everything from how to rescue injured climbers to how to deal with obnoxious clients. The job is equal parts athlete, lifeguard, drill instructor and cruise ship director.

This year, RMI got 45 applications for 10 open positions, Whittaker said. Guides are selected each year after tryouts in early May.

The work can be dangerous. RMI guide Tom O'Brien was among the 11 climbers killed in 1981 when a massive section of the Ingraham Glacier icefall broke away from the mountain. The avalanche swept the 11 into a crevasse, where their bodies remain. The 11 deaths remain the worst accident in North American mountaineering. Park officials labeled the avalanche an act of nature that RMI guides could not have foreseen nor prevented.

Two other RMI clients have died. In 1977, Mary Gnehm, 47, of Mercer Island was killed when her rope team slid 1,500 feet down the upper Ingraham Glacier. Patrick Nestler, 29, of Connecticut was killed last June when a slide of soft snow knocked his rope team off Disappointment Cleaver.

The park requires RMI to maintain $2 million in liability coverage, and clients must sign a waiver acknowledging the risk of death. That the company has never been sued surprises Whittaker.

"People sue all the time. They always like to blame somebody else," he said. "A lot of people don't understand that risk factor, why people are driven to do stuff like that."

Other clients appear drawn to the mountain precisely because of the danger.

"After our accidents on the mountain, we don't lose bookings. We gain them," Whittaker said. "A lot of people couldn't understand that, either."

Asked about his own reasons for climbing, Whittaker quotes a passage by Helen Keller that he has memorized: "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

The same passage is written on the dedication page of Whittaker's memoirs.

"You can either sit at home and not do anything or you can accept the risk. There's a little higher risk on a mountain," he said. "I figure that up on the mountain I'm safer than I am on the freeway or at midnight on First Avenue in Seattle."

As he ages, Whittaker has cut back on the time he spends high on the mountain. He reached the top of Rainier only twice in 1998, and he plans just four summit attempts during the summer of its centennial year.

But the joy is still there, he said.

"Still climbing," he said. "Still enjoy it."

(Published 1999)