Trip Report: Mt Rainier (Disappointment Cleaver)
- blindsaint
- Aug 13, 2023
- 7 min read
Climbing Mount Rainier is on every list of mountains to climb before attempting Denali, so it was for sure a big goal of mine to climb in either 2023 or 2024. My mountaineering group had been talking for months about climbing Rainier and while we all put in for group permits, only one of us got it, but that was enough. We got a permit for seven climbers to stay at Camp Muir on the Disappointment Cleaver (DC) route for two nights in July. Now we had a bunch of planning to do.
Trying to get seven guys with completely different work and life schedules all together is challenging. A couple of the guys were in the Seattle area for a family reunion, one guy was leaving for Singapore the day after our Rainier bid, another had just got back from Thailand the week before, and I was coming back from a month in Europe. By “just coming back” I mean I had to move my flights coming home in order to make enough time for me to get to my house from the airport and grab my mountaineering bags before heading back to the airport and catching my flight to Seattle. The window was really tight.
My story begins a couple days earlier. I had spent a month touring Norway and Ireland with my family and Grandmother (see other blog posts about the trip) and was leaving Dublin, Ireland to come home. Our trip took us to Iceland for a 5 hour layover where we had dinner and celebrated my son’s second birthday. We then flew to Chicago, grabbed our bags, and took a taxi to our hotel for the next 4 hours. That’s all the time we had - 4 hours to get some sleep and be headed back to the airport. I caught as much sleep as I could before getting up, getting everyone to the airport, getting my Grandma checked into her flight for Minnesota, and getting my family to our gate in a different terminal. Lack of sleep aside, I was concerned that I wouldn’t have enough time to get my stuff and get to the back to the airport if I wasn’t able to catch an earlier flight, so when we got to Phoenix, we walked to the gate agent of an earlier flight I had scouted on the website a few days earlier and asked if they could get me on it. The agent was so nice and got not just me, but my whole family on the earlier flight back to Reno. This gave me a little over an hour at my house before I’d have to leave for Seattle.
After rushing to get my stuff, check on the cat, and have my wife take me back to the airport, I made it to my flight with all my stuff successfully. I got into Seattle at 1 in the morning, rushed to the hotel room that the rest of our mountaineering group was staying at, and crept into the suit in the dark for a few hours rest. Our group consisted of 5 people I had climbed with before, one guy who was the brother of one of the 5, and another guy who I had never met and knew nothing about besides that he had taken a break from through-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail to climb Rainier with us. This last guy was going to be my tent mate for the climb and I met him at 1:30am in the dark while crawling into a queen bed beside him. This is mountaineering.
Alarms went off at 5 o’clock, but because I was still on European time, I was already awake. We got ready quickly, grabbed our bags, and headed to Paradise, the trailhead for the DC route. While registering at the ranger station, we heard about a serac fall that affected part of the route, but the ranger didn’t have much information beyond that. We headed up, hoping to gain more information from the climbers coming down and the guides on the mountain. I wasn’t ready for how beautiful the trail to Camp Muir is; I see now why people day hike up to the camp.
When we arrived at Camp Muir, we found that the first-come-first-served hut only had a few sleeping bags in it and had plenty of room for our group. The brothers decided they wanted the full mountain experience and stayed in their tent while the rest of us set up our sleeping bags in the hut. We melted snow for water while we waited for more information on the route conditions. A crevasse had opened up splitting the normal route and a detour was required, but the guides seemed unsure of how possible that was. With each little bit of information we got, our hopes for making a summit attempt right away grew slimmer and slimmer. We finally decided that we would use the next day to do some crevasse rescue training and scout the route ahead to Ingraham Flats. I got terrible sleep that night, with people coming and going from the hut, and being on the opposite sleep schedule, I did my best to just relax and get what little rest I could.
The next day, we roped up and headed across the Cowlitz Glacier and through the Cathedral Gap to check out the Ingraham Flats. The crevasses up there were wide open on the Ingraham Glacier which was both magnificent and ominous. We knew we had some major crevasse crossings between us and the summit. While up there, we got some good beta about the new route that the guides had set up but that “it goes”. So after heading back to some of the smaller crevasses near Camp Muir to do a quick rescue refresher, we filled our water bottles with melted snow and went to bed hoping for a few hours of sleep before an alpine start like none I’ve ever had before.
After hearing people talk about leaving at around 11pm, we decided that it seemed prudent to give ourselves a little extra time and leave at 10:30pm. Most alpine starts I’ve had began around 2am, so this was different starting in the evening, but the snow was nice and hard and easy to walk across and our path was easy enough to follow, at least, we knew, until after the Cleaver, where the new route began. We had 2 rope teams made up of three people and four people. The group with three people had been traveling faster the day before, so we decided they would lead and the group of four (in which I was the last person) would follow. However, when it came time to leave, our team of four was ready to move first so we set off, expecting the other team to pass us at some point throughout the climb.
We made good time to the cleaver, crossing over a crevasse via a ladder set up by one of the guide companies, and past the “bowling alley” - a place notorious for rock falls that can seriously injure climbers. The Cleaver is a large rock formation that “cleaves” a gash between two glaciers (Ingraham and Emmons) that otherwise would just be one massive glacier as they connect above and below the rocky spine. We hiked up the cleaver, feeling good and joking as we went. The guide companies had marked the route with small flags on thin bamboo shafts and we followed them as best as we could as we headed up. As we made it to the top of the Cleaver, we took a break and a guide company passed us, choosing to take the break a few minutes further where there was a larger space for all of them. They had camped at the Flats and had left a few minutes after we passed their tents.
Above the Cleaver, at about 13,000 feet, we saw the crevasse that caused the reroute and found the detour shooting off to the right. We lost about 200 feet of elevation and added an extra roughly half mile to our climb, but eventually we met back up with the original DC route and kept climbing.
We made the crater edge at around 5am and got across and up to the summit at around 5:40am. Crossing the crater, I started feeling nauseous, but I pushed through and made it to the summit where it was so windy we only spent a few minutes getting some pictures before heading back down. Our turnaround time was 7am and we wanted to get back across the crater and take a well-deserved break on that end of the crater before heading down.
The guide services that we saw took their pictures at the crater’s edge and turned around. Although I don’t care much about “true summits” vs “common summits”, I still found it odd that the guides we saw didn’t actually take their groups to the summit. As we made our way back down, I reflected on how successful we had been. All 7 of us made the summit without anyone getting injured, sick, or having major altitude issues. I felt great until the crater and even then, my energy level was higher than it had been on either of the previous Mt Shasta climbs, even though this was a higher mountain and longer route. I felt great, that is, until getting on the cleaver again.
Loose rock is not fun with tired legs, the sun shining on you, and heavy boots on. The Disappointment Cleaver lived up to its name and seemed to suck the life out of everyone. Getting down was rough, but we made it to camp in decent time, packed up and prepared to hike down to the car. As usual, once the stoke is gone, it’s hard to gain it back and the descent sucked all the way to the car. The group was split up by different travel plans and few of us stopped at Wildberry Restaurant, a Himalayan restaurant that had great food. I got my celebratory beer and the Chicken Thali and enjoyed them both immensely. The climb doesn’t end until the recovery meal is finished. I checked into my hotel, took a shower, and crashed with the first full night’s sleep in days. I flew home the next night.
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