Mount Rainier - Success Cleaver

March 31st, 2006 osgumero

Alright, I have 2 worst trip ever stories and they are in my opinion equally as bad, and being that they occurred on the same mountain I chose to do both of them.

Success Cleaver, Mount Rainier

Success Cleaver is the long ridge coming down in the middle
My boss, two of my friends and myself chose to try to climb Rainier via Success Cleaver the summer before my Senior Year of high school. We were enticed by the “alpineness” of this route since it involves no glacier travel, is really long, and nobody is on it. We planned on taking 4 days to do the route; one for the approach, one for some more approach and the lower half of the route, a day to summit and carry over down Disappointment Cleaver, and then a day to sit around and descend back to paradise.

As we were high on the route, my boss became rather ill, in fact he became violently sick. The altitude was causing him to have a nasty case of Acute Mountain Sickness, which induced an what we think might have been an asthma attack. We stopped for to rest hoping that he would be able to pull through it, but to no avail. When it came to the point when he began coughing up a pick fluid (I don’t know if it was blood or what) it became apparent that he couldn’t go any higher and needed to descend immediately. He was having trouble breathing and because of that, he had no equilibrium or balance and was basically unable to walk without assistance. The 3 of us decided that we needed to take his pack and somehow distribute it between the 3 of us, rope up and begin assisting him down to a lower elevation. This was a major ordeal since success cleaver is steep enough that if a roped team fell, it is unlikely that you could team arrest to stop a fall. It was an arduous task of at times having to plant feet and constantly having to place pickets for protection during the descent. After descending several thousand feet, we eventually camped towards the bottom of the cleaver and waited to see if his condition would improve, which it did, but it was out of the question for him to go any higher. Our summit hopes were gone by then because he couldn’t go up anymore, and if the 3 of us continued to the summit, we would be unable to carry over as planned and I wasn’t about to descend the cleaver again.

The upper mountain from around 10,000 on Success Cleaver

Entry Filed under: Whatever!, Climbing, Winter Rec, "Worse Trip Ever" Comp.