New American Offwidth Testpiece: The Cleaver 5.13b
Tom Randall and Mary Eden grind their ways up the invert crack in a newly released Wide Boyz video
In the autumn of 2023, Pete Whittaker made a flash first ascent of The Cleaver, a 5.13b offwidth climb in Day Canyon, just outside of Moab, Utah. The crack line was discovered, equipped, and first tried by Evan Wisheropp, who introduced Whittaker and crew to the climb. After Whittaker’s ascent, Tom Randall, Mari Salvesen, and Mary Eden all repeated route.
“Such a nice route in many ways as the spectrum of techniques used was far beyond most offwidths I’ve done,” said Randall about the climb on Instagram. “Often they can seem a bit too much as you’ve done the same shuffle move 50 times over but this one isn’t like that… it’s an interesting sequence of moves literally from start to finish!”
The Wide Boyz just released a video of Randall and Eden sending The Cleaver, which you can watch below. The two climbers use very different betas for entering and exiting the invert offwidth section.
Eden is one of America’s best crack climbers, with repeats of Black Mamba 5.14-, Necronomicon 5.13d/14a, Belly Full of Bad Berries 5.13-, The Price of Evil 5.13b, Mechanical Bull 5.13a, The Crack House 5.13, The Tricks Are For Kids 5.13, and Iron Sharpen Iron 5.13. Randall’s crack climbing highlights include FAing Century Crack 5.14b in Utah and The Kraken V13 roof crack in Devon, as well as repeating Cobra Crack 5.14b in Squamish. In Summer 2021, he and fellow Wide Boyz member Pete Whittaker made the FA of the 800m Great Rift 5.13, perhaps the strangest “trad” climb in the world. The pair spent four days and three nights climbing a 70-pitch horizontal crack on the underside of an elevated highway.
