ELKHORNS -- He first appears in Casey Meadows, side-stepping a slope with his dogs dashing out in front of him. His trekking pole offers stability over the snow while his pack weighs just enough to make climbing a chore.

It's around noon on Saturday and Dave Leitheiser, a civil engineer living in Clancy, is training for a spring push up Mount Rainier.

His brow beads with sweat and dark glacier goggles shade his eyes from the morning sun. Yet his face is rosy from the chill and his cheeks flush from the exertion it took to reach the meadows below Casey Peak.

Leitheiser, who says his name is pronounced like Budweiser, attempted Rainier last season. He made it as far as Camp Muir, some 10,188-feet up the glaciated peak, before a back spasm ended his trip.

Since he came so close, it's no wonder Leitheiser has spent the last year thinking about returning to finish what he started. From the time he woke that day in Camp Muir to view the starry night from 10,000 feet, Mount Rainier has rarely left his thoughts.

"It's about a four to one ascent for around four miles," he said, standing in a patch of sun catching his breath. "You go up one day and you hit the sack at about six, and you get up around midnight or so to make the ascent. When you come back down over the snow bridge, you want the snow to be good, solid and frozen."

The snow today in the Elkhorns south of Helena is anything but solid. Three days old, it has the consistency of Maui beach sand. Walking uphill is a chore, good for a cardio workout, though it does little to prepare one for glacial travel.

Casey Meadows rises as a ramp of land between parallel ridges, ending in a bowl below Casey Peak. In the shadow of the mountain, the snow retains a thin sheet of ice, like magic shell poured over slow-churned ice cream.

Leitheiser points to the shadows where he and his climbing buddies often practice their base camp skills. They don't want any surprises back on Rainier, so they play for realism whenever they head into the Montana backcountry.

"We trail off from Paradise and we hit the snowfields on Rainier right a way," he said. "It's a pretty consolidated snow. It's windblown and it gets a lot of sun. The snowfields are like this on top, but with a hard crust underneath."

Hikers heading for the summit leave the ranger station at Paradise, en route to their base camp at Muir. Getting there involves a roughly 4.5 mile hike from Paradise and a climb of around 4,700 vertical feet.

At 14,411 feet, Rainier itself marks the highest point in the Cascade Range. It's also the most glaciated peak in the lower 48 states, with roughly 35 square miles of snowfields and ice sheets that linger throughout the year.

The first known summit of the mountain took place in 1870 when Hazard Stevens and P. B. Trump scaled to the top. John Muir, the noted naturalist, reached the summit in 1888, though history says he was fonder of the view from below than above.

Today, according to the National Park Service, as many as 13,000 people a year attempt to summit Rainier, most using the route served by Camp Muir. On average, three climbers die each year in ferocious storms, falling rock, avalanches and hypothermia, in their bid for the summit.

It's not a mountain to be taken lightly, so Leitheiser trains like he hopes to climb, aiming for Rainier-style realism. He's carrying enough weight in his pack to work up a good sweat and bog down in the snow. An avalanche shovel and sleeping pad peek from the pack strapped tightly across his shoulders.

The pack holds 30 pounds of gear, about half the weight he carried up Rainier on last year's trip. It was then, he explains, that he rose at midnight to help his friends gear up for their final push to the summit. The sky was clear and the stars were close enough he thought he might touch them.

"When they left and the lights were all out, it was just beautiful," he said. "The stars were almost like you could reach out and pluck them out of the sky."

Reporter Martin Kidston: 447-4086 or mkidston@helenair.com