I Quit Smoking to Climb Mt. Rainier: Cold Turkey for a Summit

On a clear morning in August, at 14,411 feet on the summit of Mt. Rainier, I cried. The kind of crying where you do not bother wiping your face because you are wearing goggles and it does not matter. The wind was twenty miles an hour and the sun was blinding off the snowpack and I had not slept in thirty-six hours. I had never been so tired in my life.

Two years before that morning, I could not walk up a flight of stairs without getting winded.

My name is Claire Hill. I am 43, I live in Seattle, and I smoked for twenty years before I quit cold turkey to train for a mountain I was not sure I could climb. I have been smoke-free for two and a half years. Here is what happened.

I started smoking at 22 in the way a lot of people start, gradually and without a clear decision point. A boyfriend smoked. Friends smoked. Seattle in my twenties had a bar culture where smoking was everywhere, or at least it felt that way. By 25, I had my own pack. By 30, a pack a day habit I told myself I would deal with eventually.

Eventually never showed up. Twenty years went by.

I was not an inactive person even as a smoker. I hiked recreationally, the accessible trails around the Cascades, Tiger Mountain, Little Si, the kind of hikes that Seattle people do on weekends. But I knew what my lungs felt like on uphills. There was a specific sensation on any sustained climb, a tightness and a burn that was not the normal burn of exertion but something more constricted. I ignored it because ignoring it was easier than what I would have to change.

The Mt. Rainier idea came from my friend Jess, who had been talking about doing a guided summit attempt for three years. She finally booked it through Rainier Mountaineering Inc., one of the established guiding companies out of Ashford. She asked if I wanted to join her. The climb was eight months away.

I said yes before I finished processing what I was agreeing to. Then I went home and looked up what a Rainier summit actually required.

You gain roughly 9,000 feet of elevation on the standard Disappointment Cleaver route. You typically spend one night at Camp Muir at 10,188 feet before pushing for the summit at midnight or 1 AM to hit the top by morning. The guides would not take you up with a heart condition, and they strongly recommended cardiovascular fitness testing before the attempt. One of the pre-climb recommendations listed clearly on the RMI website: do not smoke.

I had known my lungs were compromised. Seeing it stated as a formal recommendation for a goal I had already committed to made it concrete in a way that nothing had before. I could not summit a 14,000-foot volcanic peak with smoker’s lungs. I did not have time to taper down, to slowly reduce, to ease into it. I had eight months, and I needed every one of them to get my cardiovascular capacity to where it needed to be.

I smoked my last cigarette on a Tuesday evening, went to bed, and woke up Wednesday as a non-smoker. Cold turkey.

The first month of training was the hardest period of the entire experience, and the hardest part of the training was not the mountain, it was Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park on a rainy October morning. I had planned a three-mile loop with about 400 feet of elevation gain. Nothing extreme. I had done this trail before.

Twenty minutes in, my lungs were on fire. Not the tight, restricted fire of smoking. A different kind of burn, which I later understood was my inflamed airways in the early stages of clearing. My body was both in nicotine withdrawal and being asked to perform aerobic work, and neither system was happy about it. I stopped twice. I considered going home. My pace was embarrassingly slow.

I did not go home. I finished the loop and drove back to Seattle feeling more demoralized than I expected. I had romanticized the quitting-for-a-goal narrative in my head. The reality was that my body needed to actually recover and there were no shortcuts.

I got on a training plan structured around the Rainier prep curriculum. Four days a week of cardio, weighted pack carries up hills, stair training in the off weeks. I worked with a trainer at a gym in Capitol Hill who understood mountaineering fitness. The first month was grinding and discouraging. The second month was marginally less grinding. By month three, something shifted.

My lungs stopped burning on uphills. Not all at once. The transition was gradual and one day I was halfway up Poo Poo Point and I noticed that I was breathing hard but breathing freely, the way exercise feels when your cardiovascular system is actually working and not fighting you. I stood at the top of that hill and started laughing.

I had not felt my lungs work properly in years.

The other thing that happened in those months: the cigarette cravings transformed. In the first two weeks off cigarettes, the cravings were physical and urgent and almost overwhelming after meals and in the morning. I used every trick people recommend, I drank water, I took walks, I called people. By six weeks, the physical cravings were largely gone. What replaced them were the situational, habitual pulls. Driving on I-90 with the windows down used to mean a cigarette. A beer after work used to come with a cigarette on the building’s back steps. Those associations persisted long after the physical addiction faded.

The training schedule helped enormously with this. When you have a 6 AM stair workout, you do not have a beer on a Tuesday night. The mountain essentially reorganized my social and behavioral patterns around a different goal. My evenings changed. My weekends changed. I was in bed by ten on weeknights because I had to be up for training. There was simply less time and energy for the habits that had always accompanied smoking.

The craving I remember most vividly came around month two. I had a brutal day at work, the kind where everything goes wrong in cascading order, and I drove home along Lake Washington in November rain and I wanted a cigarette so badly I could feel the weight of the pack in my jacket pocket even though there was no pack. I sat in my car in the parking garage of my building for maybe five minutes, just sitting. I thought about how close I was to the convenience store on the corner.

Then I thought about Rainier. About the specific image I had been holding for eight months: the summit crater, the view south to Mt. Adams and Mt. Hood, the feeling of having actually done it. I thought about my lungs in month three, how they had started working again. I thought about all the training hours.

I went upstairs and made dinner.

The summit day is compressed in my memory the way extreme experiences often are. The midnight wake-up at Camp Muir, the cold, the headlamps making small circles of light on the snow ahead of each person. The roped team moving slowly up the Cleaver. The guide’s voice telling us to keep our pace slow and steady. The sky going from black to deep blue to the first gray light. And then the sun coming over the Cascades and the crater rim coming into view and the moment when the rope team crossed onto the summit and I understood that we had made it.

I stood there and cried.

My lungs had carried me to 14,411 feet. After twenty years of being used as an ashtray, they had delivered me to the top of a volcano.

I am planning to attempt Denali in the next two years. The training is already underway. My lungs are the best cardiovascular tool I have, and I treat them like it.

To anyone reading this who smokes and has a physical goal they keep pushing off because of it: the goal is real. The body recovers. I am living proof that twenty years of damage can begin reversing meaningfully in months when you stop adding to it and start asking something of it instead.

You are not too old. You are not too far gone. Your lungs want to work. Give them a reason and get out of their way.

You are not alone. There are other people at the trailhead who made the same choice you are considering. Find your mountain, literal or otherwise. Start the training. Stop smoking today. The summit is actually out there.