On the snow, just below Heliotrope ridge (I think).
Mt Baker, Coleman Glacier
Saturday, Jun 6, 1998. With Russ
The drive up to Mt. Baker takes quite a while, about 2½ hours. I didn’t have a parking pass, and the two gas stations we tried to buy them at didn’t sell them, so, we decided to finesse it. We registered at the ranger station, drove up to the trailhead, where there were already over a dozen vehicles, mostly trucks, parked. The road continued up from the parking area, and I assumed that was the beginning of the trail. Another guy and woman were getting ready; as we were leaving, I asked him to verify it, and he said that no, it wasn’t, and pointed to the correct trail, on the opposite end of the parking area from the bathroom. We were on the trail at about 6:50.
It took about an hour to get to the snowfield. We stopped near the top of Heliotrope Ridge for a snack, and watched the marmots frolicking. Russ hadn’t seen marmots before; I guess they don’t have them in Britain.
It was a beautiful day, a beautiful place. There were a couple of tents pitched there, and it seemed to me that it would be a perfect place to camp for about three days, just hanging out and exploring the mountain. It’s quite pretty, really scenic. I don't like camping much, as a rule, but right then it nearly made sense to turn around, get the car and drive back to Seattle to get camping gear and drive back up here, to be able to spend a couple of nights here. The shape of the north side of mountain is similar to Mt. Rainier, but smaller, of course; the upper mountain is very steep, with the Coleman Headwall, and then it’s much less steep on the Coleman glacier, very similar to the way the Willis Wall feeds the Carbon Glacier, the North Ridge in place of Rainier's Curtis Ridge.
We roped up before we had to, I think, though where glacier travel is concerned, it’s far better to be safe than sorry. The night before, I’d spent fifteen minutes or so relearning how to tie a butterfly knot, to my relief, I was able to do it without a problem today. It’s hard to say whether having the twelve pounds (or so) of rope, seat harness, etc, out of my pack made for a net savings of effort, since walking with a rope is complicated and slower than without one. We roped up on a section of glacier (or snowfield, it’s hard to tell) because I saw what looked like lips of glaciers ahead of us. As we approached and passed them, I saw that they were actually holes dug out for tents.
One cool thing is that from Heliotrope Ridge you can see down onto the lower Coleman glacier where it’s severely crevassed, looking remarkably like the lower sections of the Ruth glacier up in Alaska.
The route was actually considerably longer than I’d remembered. We stopped for lunch around 12:00, and I thought we were fifteen minutes from the saddle between the main peak, Grant peak and Colfax peak (Colfax was Grant’s Vice-President, for you history buffs out there.) In fact, we were 2½ hours from getting above the saddle. There were very dramatic hanging ice formations on Colfax peak, and we saw and heard a couple of minor icefalls.
The mountains all around us were obscured with clouds; as we got above the saddle I couldn’t even see Baker Lake at all; it was all clouded in. The sky above us, though, was a brilliant dark blue.
As we were heading up towards the saddle, a little slower than I would have preferred but ultimately at a very wise speed, we were passed by a couple of guys that seemed to be traveling a lot faster than us. They were an odd pair, the lead guy was obviously the experienced one, the second guy didn’t even have a pack, or anything warmer than a t-shirt, and they were roped together with static line, and it was looped around their waists rather than using a seat harness. Just past where we were sitting, the trail passed over a crevasse that was maybe two feet wide. You could fall into it, I suppose, if you really tried. The sides were straight, and there was no overhang of any kind. Still the experienced guy had his novice rig a boot-ax belay for him, then rigged one for the novice. It seemed a little like a guy trying to impress a girl with his car expertise.
We ended up passing them an hour later, and they probably got to the summit an hour and a half after us. On the way down, I asked whether they had headlamps, in what I hoped didn't sound like an entirely patronizing voice, and learned that they had hiked in with overnight gear, so they just had to make it back down to the snowfield.
The day was still and sunny, quite nice to hike in, but after we got above the saddle, the wind picked up and it got a lot chillier. Up till now I’d used my coat for sitting on, now I was glad to have it for warmth. With the hood up and glove shields on, I was fairly comfortable, with the 30mph or so wind whipping past. There was a very thin coating of ice on the snow, and sometimes the wind would blow bits of it free, and it would go spinning off like pieces of newspaper in a tornado movie.
The climb up the ramp went pretty slow. Eventually it meets with a rock ridge, and we unroped there, which simplified the final push, which was pretty slow. (I used a wand to mark the rope, which was fortunate since on the descent I could see the wand well before I made out the rope. It would have been a real drag to loose half an hour looking for my rope.) The steep part of the summit dome was really tough going, between the wind and the steepness and the sloppy snow. Fortunately, there was a very good set of steps near the top, which saved a great deal of work. It isn’t the climb so much as it is struggling with the snow, slipping and plunging unpredictably in the pockmarked slope.
We got to the summit 4:00 or so; as I was descending from the summit dome, I checked my watch and it was 4:22. There was a snow wall built on the south side of the summit dome, and that’s where Russ stopped.
I felt obligated to slog over to the true summit. If it’s higher than the south side, it’s less than five feet difference.
I did this for two reasons; to find the summit box and sign it, and to get a view of Mt. Shuksan. The summit book, however, was buried under feet of snow. I did see Mt. Shuksan, though it wasn’t a calendar photo view, partly obscured by clouds and the yellow haze. The summit pyramid was completely snow-free, several weeks earlier in the year than when I’d climbed it (two years ago) when it was still very snowy. It’s surprising how much lower down Shuksan looks; it’s only about a thousand feet lower, but from the top of Baker, it looks half the height of Baker.
One of the things I’d hoped to be able to do was have a look at Sherman crater. From the summit dome you can’t see it all that well, but I could see it well enough to see some steam wafting out from it.
The descent went pretty quickly. We were down off Grant Peak (the summit peak) and below the saddle in half an hour, compared with the two hours we’d spent going up. We could have gone more quickly glissading, but I didn’t feel comfortable glissading with crampons on.
The descent was work because the snow was so damp; it was normal to sink two feet down as we went. As we got to less steep ground, the sinking was less of a problem, but it still made for slower going that we’d have liked. We crossed over more crevasses and saw more, than I remembered seeing on the way up; presumably it’s easier to see them from above than from below.
There were an astonishing number of tents up as we descended, and lots of activity and more people arriving. I counted about 35 tents on the upper glacier, and as we continued our descent, we saw another dozen or more. The summit route Sunday looks to be pretty crowded, I bet there’ll be more than a hundred people up there.
When we got to what looked like the end of the snow we stopped and unroped, and divested ourselves of other unnecessary gear, "dekitted" as Russ called it. I coiled up the rope and put it back into the bottom of my pack, took off my seat harness and gaiters (the crampons had gone some time above) and tried again to call Heidi. Remarkably I hadn’t gotten any cellular service at the summit (just as I hadn’t on Shuksan either) and I figured I’d give it a shot from here just so I could say I’d tried. However, at Heliotrope ridge, about 4500 feet below the summit on the north side of the mountain (north, so shielded from Bellingham and most of the rest of the state) the reception was very good. I was relieved to be able to talk to Heidi so that she wouldn’t worry. Someone please explain cellular service to me, again?
Then I heaved the now-outrageously heavy pack back onto my back, and we continued on down. Unfortunately there was a couple hundred more yards of snow, and without the gaiters I filled my boots with snow pretty completely, since it was pretty soft. But from there it was less than an hour through the woods to the car, and I didn’t care that much, since my feet were already pretty wet.
On the way out, there were still people coming in. Halfway out you cross a rocky stream, and there was a couple of snowboarders there, with their snowboards strapped to their back, gear stowed any which way. One of the guys had a gallon jug of water hanging around his neck. Those guys are kind of out there. The other guy was an absolute caricature of a snow boarder: long stringy curly hair, dressed in baggy "shredder" clothes, talked in a vague, druggy way, but friendly enough.
From about halfway up I was worrying that Russ wouldn’t be able to summit. He kept saying his legs had nothing left, but he kept going. Up on the summit dome, when I was climbing, head down, one foot after the other, not wanting to look up at the top of the slope receding from me, every five minutes or so I looked back to see Russ right back there. At one point up there, her shouted "Doesn’t this thing ever end?" He’s from England, where the tallest mountain is about 6500 feet, he has no real context for a 10,000 foot mountain.
On the trail heading out, he went faster than I wanted to, and got to the car a few minutes ahead of me. The real kicker is that he said on the hike out that he didn’t really do anything to stay in shape, he just hikes sometimes on weekends with his wife, and that’s about it.
We stopped at the ranger station to sign out, and I was a little surprised to count 34 climber registration forms stacked on top of mine.
As we approached Bellingham, the sun was setting, and a bloody red sun it was. We joked about it being a sign of the apocalypse, and then Russ noticed a weird face on a cloud to the north. "The angel of death" he called it. Plus, we could see that it was a full moon. All in all, it seemed lucky that we’d climbed today rather than putting it off until tomorrow, if the world was in fact going to end. (editor’s note: the world, in fact, did not end on June 7, 1998)
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