Climb: Mt. Rainier-Nisqually Ice Cleaver

Date of Climb: 6/7/2006

Trip Report:
Rolled out at 2:15am from Paradise Lodge. We were socked in and hiking in drizzle, but soon climbed up above the clouds. The mountain was clear and my earlier doubts about the weather vanished. We roped up just passed muir when we saw crevasses in the basin below the ice cliff. Our party was Myself, my buddy Eric and our good friend Mr. Peanut (Joey).

We reached the ice cliff around 6 and decided to unrope before starting the steep climbing.


The snow was wind-scoured in places and basically solid everywhere but soft in the center of the glacier.

The conditions were very solid on the left, where we planned to take as direct a line as possable to the summit.
(Red is Ascent route, Green is Descent)


Saw the TR of the group a couple weeks ago and it looked awsome! We had already been planning this line and their report got me even more stoked! we went very similar except for continuing direct toward the summit where they exited right here.

After pushing hard all morning, exhaustion was setting in fast as we trudged toward the summit ridge. We made it to the top just after 12. High winds and zero-visibility clouds soon joined us.

We hunkerd down behind a small fin of rock to get out of the blasting wind. Eric boiled water while Joey and I nodded off onto our axes that were anchoring us into the mountain. After some discussion we decided to decend down the Gibralter Chute. The snow was questionable at the top of the chute, but we soon noticed that a skier had scraped away most of the bad snow in the chute. We felt a little safer and the downclimbing went very fast. It turned out to be an excellent descent route.

We stumbled off down to paradise and made it back to the car around 7. About 17 hours CTC. We had a great (if exhausting) time and the route was excellent!


Gear Notes:
2 pickets
4 screws
rope
(didn't use screws or pickets though)

nice!

Great job, guys!
We climbed Nisqually Cleaver few weeks ago. I am surprised this aesthetic route doesn't receive much traffic - it's the only semi-technical route on the south side (Muir approach) of Rainier. I can’t believe majority of people take the DC route - it maybe good for the West Butt training but not for enjoyment of climbing. In terms of danger, the DC has plenty of ice and rock fall potential. Back in the 50s, Nisqually was heavily traveled. The cleaver potentially has multiple lines of ascent, some are very steep.

Great TR. sounds like a great trip.

Yes Oleg- I am also wondering why more people don't do this route. I saw it in a guidebook and thought it looked cool, but was described as "prob. never climbed". and then people said you guys had 2nd ascent maybe. After climbing it- our group was a bit sceptical of all that. It just seems such an obvious line to the top. Granted, it was no cake walk, but it wasn't rediculous either and such a pleasing line. Grateful on anyone wanting to chime in on if this had been climbed before or if not- then why?? we are just curious about its history- don't really care about 3rd ascent, 4th, 200th, whatever...
p.s. awsome TR Oleg, it got us all very excited for our trip! great pics too.

Very nice effort you guys. Cool route and an impressive round-trip time (IMO).

What was your impression of the route,s exposure to rockfall, serac avalanches, etc? In some of the photos the line looks like it'd be threatened by plenty of both? Is this accurate or a bystander's misperception?

Thanks for the compliment, Nordicpunk! The book describes it as dangeous, so people avoid it. You probably saw the trail of debries at the base of the climb, the proof of its violent nature. But I think by staying to the left, one can avoid icecliffs. There is rockfall though.

CBS...correct; the traditional Nisqually Cleaver was first done by Wick & Dunham. The direct route, which this TR is a repeat of...was prolly a 3rd or 4th ascent, by my reckoning. Originally climbed in a single day push a few years ago by J. Edwards & T. Kelsay.

The traditional route goes more or less straight up once the glacier is reached...through some rock bands to the W side of the cleaver...then up the Nisqually Glacier to the top of the cleaver. The direct route climbs on the Nisually Ice Cliff glacier (if it can be called that), and hugs the rock on the E side of the cleaver, to its top. There's often a cornice on the cleaver, overhanging to the E.

Nice work gang...that's a fun route!

JayB- I would recomend starting even earlier than we did to make it a little more safe. You can see from the fourth pic that there were spots with huge seracs AND crappy rock/ melty icicles. We tried to move quickly through these sections and looked for the best looking rock to hide out under to rest. There were small ice chunks and rocks coming down sporadically but nothing very big broke loose. The route is great but just know that once you start up the route you should be comitted to move fast and hard to get to the top (which is exhausting because of altitude and steepness). Also, there is a lot of rockfall below the icecliff and we approached well to the left of this.