"Disappointment Cleaver is not Mount Rainier’s most aesthetic ski route yet it sees a handful of ski descents every season. The circuitous nature of the route and off fall-line nature of the cleaver itself do not make for the best skiing"
- Rainier N.P. Official Disappointment Cleaver Route Guide

Sometimes, you pick an objective, you and two of your closest mountain friends train together, the weather works out, but the snow just isn't there when you arrive. My friends Jack B., Luke L. and I had been prepping for a 1 day climb/ski of Fuhrer Finger on Mt. Rainier over the previous winter. Luke is beastly all the time, but Jack and I started treating our preperation more seriously than in years prior, and worked with a coach (Matt at Stray Dogs Performance, he's great) so we could not only get up Rainier and ski down, but do it in a day with extra gas in reserve.

In the months coming up to our planned time that we had carved out, we got increasingly skeptical that the route would be in due to the year's snowpack and our somewhat late season window. About a week before we got there, we got word that F.F. was probably out due to a large crevasse on the upper Nisqually. Ingraham Direct, the typical backup ski route from Paradise, was also pretty chopped up, and a large ice slide had deposited debree all over it just days before, making for difficult skiing and route finding, not to mention the hangfire risk.

That said, we saw a nice weather window open up and decided we would still haul our skis up and come down in a day the unconventional conventional way, Disapointment Cleaver.

The day started at 11:30 PM "waking up" in the back of Jack's car, which was hot enough overnight that I really didn't get any sleep at all. I downed an uncrustables that I bought at a gas station the previous day as we all drove to Paradise, making at least one wrong turn along the way. By the time we were geared up and ready to start, my stomach was rather unpleased. The uncrustables hadn't liked the hot night in car just as much as I it seemed. I thought about how stupid it would be for a gas station sandwhich to ruin months of training, and decided I would just suck it up. Thankfully it mostly went away in about an hour after our start at ~1 AM.

We skinned up to the steeper section below Panorama Point, and after some sliding around equipped our ski crampons, which stayed on till past Muir. We made it up to Camp Muir just before 4:30 AM and enjoyed first light on the mountian. Approaching Muir in the dark was funny, it looked 5 minutes away when I first saw the rocks next to it, but it was really like 40. The volcanoes in particular seem to have a way of making you forget just how big they really are, I've had very similar experiences on St. Helens and Hood since.

We roped up for our first glacier (the first one Jack and I had ever been on, aside from St. Mary's anyways) and kept a move on, following some lamps ahead of us starting up Cathedral Gap. At the top we briefly had to take the skis off and walked on mixed rock/snow around to Ingraham flats. I almost lost my phone on this section after failing to get it situated in my pocket, it slid about 20 feet down and got caught in a sun cup. Whew.

Crossing the Ingraham glacier was a highlight of the day, with huge open crevasses everywhere. We were able to skin across the edges of the crevasses and look down into them. So cool. We spotted Adams a long ways away, and it was hard to believe a mountain that big was over 2,000' lower than the one we were standing on.

Going up the cleaver was pretty chill, we unroped and kept crampons on, booting through some big sun cups, then scrambling easy 3rd class rock past some guided parties. I would HATE to have a rope on me for this section if I were doing it guided, it knocks so many rocks around, is a big hassle to think about, and seems completely unecessary. We scoped out the I.D. route while on the cleaver, seeing if perhaps we could ski the face of the cleaver and enter the glacier low down, but everything was too open.

From the top of the cleaver, we put the skins/ski crampons on for a while, probably putting in more effort than it was worth to skin up steep stuff. There were a few micro-crevasses, perhaps big enough for a leg but not enough to fall into. As expected, the route was well booted and flagged. It was just a matter of continuing to eat enough and putting our heads down and grinding it out.

The last 1,000' or so was done entirely in a lenticular, so visibility was limited to about 20-40 feet. With the flags and gps navigation as a backup, this wasn't a huge deal but we did have a moment to pause and check in with each other before continuing on. Unfortunately this cloud hung around the entire time we were above ~13,500', so we didn't get any summit views, nor could we really tell we were in a volcanic crater as we passed through en-route to the summit ridge.

I made sure to reference the latest known Rainier HP, and we tagged both that and the traditional Columbia Crest, reaching the real HP just after 11 AM. There, we had a rope tangling issue that took us somewhere around 20 minutes to resolve, it got really twisted up. Lesson learned, always dump the kiwi coils one at a time. It wasn't super fun hanging out in the cold, but we weren't going to ski down with only one usable rope (we used 2 30m 6mil glacier ropes, which was perfect).

After sorting that out, we skied off the summit, pushed and skated across the crater, found the flags and followed them, and eventually escaped the clouds to awesome corn conditions on the upper mountain. We skied carefully, but had a lot of fun making turns down the moderate face, looking at the Tatoosh range and remembering that those were regular sized mountains all the way down there.

For the cleaver itself, we skied the off-fall-line face south of the ridgeline (skiers right), making longer right turns than left ones to stay high enough. Honestly, this was really fun still, and it didn't bother me one bit to be up there as opposed to the ID. The lower section of the cleaver was more interesting though, the whole face was covered in ~1' tall sun cups, but they had softened up enough that we could plow through them. Luke led the charge, making jump turns and stomping the sun cups down while Jack and I enjoyed a slightly smoother ride behind him (I got to stay in the back all day since I had the most rope skill, meaning I got the best uphill track, was least likely to fall into a crevasse, and got this sweet deal!). Honestly all in all, this part of the ski was a little humerous, I did not dislike it at all. Sometimes the mountains have jokes up their sleeves, it's better to laugh with them instead of getting sour.

Unfortunately there was a brief section, maybe 100' horizontal feet or less where we had to take the skis off to end up back on the Ingraham in the right spot. Rocks were falling off the cleaver as we sat under it getting our skis back on, which was the perfect time for Luke to have some binding issues. Standing under that face constantly looking up in anticipation of rockfall was the only real scary part of the day, thankfully he got it figured out before we got hit. Pushing ourselves back over the glacier was no issue,also a good place to go fast just in case . From here we dropped lower than where we climbed up and skied some very thin snow back around to near cathedral gap. I think we all scraped our skis up a bit, but it minimized our walking distance significantly. An even shorter walk brought us back to snow, and we skied over to Muir.

It was TOASTY now, but thankfully I brought shorts for the party ski portion. I stripped off all my layers, took off my gloves (which I forgot on the bench :(, RIP Hestras), explored the camp a little, and then we proceeded to ski slush 5000ish feet back to the car. My skis weren't waxed super recently so I had to ride on my tails a bit during this section to stay upright, which got tiring pretty fast. Nonetheless, this was a blast of a ski, especially with no stress about timing, conditions, or crevasses.

We arrived at paradise around 1 PM to Jack's partner Sarah and my partner Rebekah cheering for us with lawn chairs and snacks set up in the parking lot, which was much appreciated! After some celebreation, Luke saw that he hadn't actually hit 10k gain for the day (we did 9.5k) so he strapped back into his skis and headed back up. I thought about joining him, but decided I wasn't one for hitting elevation thresholds and was happy enough with Rainier. We learned after he kept going and got 11k vert, and then went out and skied Adams shortly after. He's a really motivational guy to be around, both in and out of the mountains.

I'm really glad I got to climb and ski Rainier with these two friends of mine. All in all, the DC is a fine enough way to ski Rainier, and I couldn't have asked for a better day.

While it is a shame we didn't get the finger, I live here now so I can go back whenever I want!

Also, thanks Jack for the awesome photos!