Ellensburg climbers summit five Washington volcanoes in under four days

A Central Washington University police officer achieved new heights this summer when he and his climbing buddy summited the state's five tallest peaks in record time.

From July 9-12, Lieutenant Marc McPherson and longtime friend Nick Burson — a corporal with the Kittitas County Sheriff’s Department — climbed Mount Rainier, Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, Mount Baker, and Glacier Peak in rapid succession.

When they finally reached the Glacier Peak parking lot on July 12, they had set a new record for scaling the five peaks in one trip: 3 days, 23 hours and 44 minutes — almost a full day faster than the mark they set in 2021.

“It blew my mind," McPherson said in an article published in The Spokane Spokesman-Review on July 26. "I had no clue we'd actually be able to pull it off.”

According to the article, 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.

McPherson and Burson have been climbing together for about 15 years, and they have become known in the Northwest climbing community for their breakneck pace.

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 that year, they felt a major sense of accomplishment.

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

After the super-human climbing duo firmly established themselves in the record books once again, they were able to rest easy.

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

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Photos courtesy of The Spokane Spokesman-Review.