Climbing the Volcano.

Mount Baker 10,778', in the North Cascades, is the most shoreward mountain in the cascade range. Because of that it gets the most snowfall and holds the record for the highest annual snowfall (95 feet) of any mountain in the contiguous US. Another interesting fact is that Mount Baker is the second most active volcano and the most heavily crevassed mountain in the contiguous US.

This is an interesting mountain and this past weekend I led a small, but dedicated, team to the summit.

Originally I had planned on driving up to the trailhead and meeting my 2 climbing partners on Thursday evening, sleeping in the vehicle, and then hitting the trail around 7AM. Busy schedule and unanticipated commitments caused me to have to leave out on Friday morning. This meant that I had to get out of bed at 3:30AM to get ready and drive up to the trailhead for our meet. I did a good job of getting things ready the night before and made my schedules, meeting my team at roughly 6:30AM.

The trailhead elevation is at about 3,100', the hike in was relatively uneventful and the trail was quite easy. We even had a couple of beautiful waterfalls to distract us from the effort of carrying our over loaded backpacks up the hill.

The crossing of Kulshan Creek was a little tricky but it looked worse than it actually was and we barely got our feet wet.

We worked our way up and onto the glacier, finding a nice camping area at the Black Buttes. Camping was on the glacier at an elevation of approximately 7,200' with wonderful weather and good visibility of the route to the summit.

Some cloudiness did come in overnight but the temps were quite mild and the clouds were high so I wasn't worried about conditions being poor for our summit attempt. As is the tradition, we arose at around 2:00AM to prepare for an early start for the summit. This is generally done in order to do most of your climb under favorable cold conditions while the snow is much more solid. I really think this was unnecessary on this climb because of the warm conditions even at this early hour. Besides, this is what a climbing camp looks like at 2:00AM:

We left our glacier camp at around 3:00AM. As the weather had been quite nice for the past week and many climbers had summitted over the preceding days, the route up the glacier was quite easy to follow. The glacier was in prime condition with the crevasses all well covered and having very solid snow bridges. The lower portion of the glacier has a fairly low angle slope and the early evidence of the sun made for a spectacular horizon.

There is a steep step of about 100' to gain the Pumice Ridge which is snow covered. The climbers that I was leading to the summit did a great job of not complaining and holding a nice steady pace up and onto the ridge.

From the ridge you work your way up and onto the Roman Wall, the steepest portion of the climb. The snow conditions were poor, to say the least, with knee deep postholing on the way up the Wall. As hard as this was for travel, it was probably good for my inexperienced climbers because it feels much more secure than icy conditions through this very steep portion of the climb.

We made our way up over the top of the Roman Wall where the slope becomes less steep and less of an effort.

And a little above this you reach the broad summit plateau. A short hike across the Plateau brings you to a summit cone. We reached the top of the Summit Cone 10,778', at around 7:30AM, not bad considering the experience of the couple I was leading. We met up with another group up there and spent a few minutes talking, getting some pics;

and then promptly headed down. What you can't gather from this summit photo was that the wind was blowing at around 35 knots and freezing sleet started moments after the shot.

The trip down the mountain was quite uneventful other than even worse conditions on the Roman Wall where, if you got off the packed snow, you would sink to your crotch. We were able to get off the wall, down the ridge, and off the step without incident though and made it back to our camp right at noon. We broke camp, loading all of our stuff in our packs, and headed down the trail, making it out to our vehicles by 3:00PM.

Overall, this was a great climb and I considered it a huge success simply because the couple I was guiding thoroughly enjoyed themselves and didn't seem to have any moments where they were wishing they weren't on the mountain. Best of all, Bruce had a nice cold Mike's Hard Lemonade for me at the truck!

Great climb and a great time with some great friends!

Cheers!

Cap'n Ron