Mt Baker (WA), May 2001.

Mt Baker, a trip report by Leon Islas.
Edited (slightly) by Keith Hoek.
Click on the images to see larger versions.

May 19th, 2001.

So … I have been climbing in the gym (and once outside) with Matt Nelson. He’s an undergrad from the University of Washington with a passion for mountaineering. Matt’s young and enthusiastic, which is both good and bad.

Matt and I had talked a lot about doing some cool stuff in the North Cascades, like the Beckey route on Liberty Bill. We had also discussed another Beckey fuckfest on Forbidden Peak. On one occasion he had said that his girlfriend (Laura) and another immunobiology grad student friend were coming along and they wanted to do Rainier.

“Rainer?” I say, “I can hardly climb the stairs in my apartment building and you want to climb Rainer?” (pause) “OK.”

But then he got in a bike accident and we had to reconsider the whole thing. We settled for Mt Baker. A Cascade giant in the north Mt Baker is very close to Canada; Matt suggested the Coleman glacier route, which is long but moderate.

So … we are ready to go at 5 am on Saturday 19th (May). His friend Mark has a new Subaru Outback and when he pulls in front of my apartment in Fremont I can see the enormous pile of crap in the back which is their gear. To this my own personal pile is added with some pain. Already I can imagine the burden of carrying this stuff up a long and steep glacier.

We head to Bellingham and it starts raining. By the time the car is climbing up the road towards the Mt Baker trail head it’s a deluge. We reach the snow line at 3000 feet and park. The summit reaches 10700 feet, so we have all of the difference to walk and climb on snow and ice. I shoulder my 65 pounds plus and, clad in gortex, start the walk. We reach the actual trail head at 3700 feet and sign in at the registry. At some point the rain switches to freezing rain and we can’t see the mountain because of heavy shrouding mists. At about 4000 feet we meet a descending party which has decided to call it quits, they say that early that morning the whole place was a whiteout and very windy. At this point and to our left, we can see through a sudden opening of clouds the terminus of the northeast branch of the Coleman. It is an enormous icefall full of grinding seracs and it is making noises, terrible ones. Very quickly the view disappears and we resume our path. Some time later we meet a pair of Canadians who are also climbing but seem unsure about the route, they don’t even have a map. So we four stop and work out that we are probably right in the middle of the glacier. We dump the gear and get the harnesses and ropes out and all the prussiks ready (I have my own luxurious Petzl ascender, thank you guys!), and then we rope up spaced about 50 feet apart. The snow covering the glacier is deep, but it is loose so the axes are useless. Matt is in front and I come second, next is Laura and Mark brings up the rear. Our speeds are very different and that makes walking hard. I move a little faster than Matt and the rope coils in front of my feet, and being faster than Laura I sometimes pull her so I have to wait, then Matt catches up the slack again and pulls me!

glacier terminus a Lincoln peak the summit after the storm
The orginal plan called for camping at 9000 feet, but it is now about 3 pm and we are below 6000 feet and very tired. There is supposedly a flat spot at 6000 feet and a decision is made to use that as a base camp, but we can’t see shit in this mist and the flat spot is nowhere to be found. After another hour we are close to 7000 feet and see a dark patch which might be a steep rock wall. We head in that direction and reach a flat area by a nice, if short, rock spire. We also find here the two Canadians setting up camp and a group of four older dudes, all perhaps in their late forties, making dinner. The cargo is dropped like sacks of shit and we spot a nice snow slope with a hole, a small snow cave the four dudes used this morning in the blizzard to cook. I ask if they have any plans for it, they don’t, and they approve our desire to make it into a shelter.

By this time the clouds have started to part and we can see, less than a mile away, the Lincoln peaks. These are part of the mountain and form a big rock buttress too steep to support even a hanging glacier, there must be a lot of potiential for mixed routes which reach over a thousand feet of empty space.

the snow cave the view from the snow cave
We finish our improvements to the cave and make dinner, by the time we are done eating the summit is visible. For the first time we can make out the route we are to take the next morning. It follows the right side of the glacier to a saddle and then up a steep ridge (which marks the glacier headwall). There are crevasses and seracs on the route but it seems as if we can navigate through them. We have to get up at 4 am and be quick when we do, so we go to bed. This is the first time that I slept in a snow cave and I worried that my body heat was going to melt the base and make for a wet and miserable night. But somehow I stayed warm and dry.

At four everybody is up and the older guys are first to get going. Headlamps are unnecessary as the sun is already making its presence felt. We organize some breakfast and melt snow for water, finishing up and moving on at 5.30 am. The dudes in front of us are slow but they are kicking steps for us, so we decide to hang back. The Canadians are not as patient and they go ahead. The first snow fields are spectacular and as we get closer to the steeper part the sun is rising from behind the mountain.

To the right of the route is an older peak called Crater Summit and it has a spectacular hanging glacier and a field of seracs down to its foot. We reach the saddle and find that the wind has picked up, in fact it has become very cold and we have to stop to put on another layer of fleece. Our return time is set at 1 pm and it is now about 10.30 am.

At the saddle there are some wands that were placed by on of the parties up ahead, and we discover that they mark a partially hidden crevasse. We negotiate it by jumping across. The summit is gained by a climb along an exposed ridge that divides the Coleman glacier and another one on the south face. This ridge ends on a small cornice that provides some protection from the wind and here we stopped to eat and drink. The party of four older dudes was also hunkered down here, they took off about 20 minutes before we did. These guys were going even slower than before but we kept behind them thinking that we could follow their steps. In fact the wind was blowing so fast that it was filling even Matt’s steps before I got to them! After about an hour of relatively steep climbing we reached the summit. It was 12.30pm.

the summit is near looking back down the descent
The wind up here was fierce and we only had time to snap a couple of pictures before heading back down. The descent was somewhat scary, as the wind was threatening to throw me off balance all of the time. A fall here would be difficult to arrest.

When we reached the saddle on the way back our steps had been erased, so we had a bit of trouble finding a good route clear of crevasses. Although the main problem was the sun blasting away and melting the snow, making it unstable. On the north face of the summit cone there was a the scar of a massive avalanche that must have happened while we where at the summit! More than an avalanche, it was an ice fall from the lip of a glacier which carried over a lot of snow.

By the time we made it back to camp we were buggered to hell. It took about two hours to get the gear organized for the descent. We did this with snowshoes, I was carrying maybe 75 pounds (in addition to all my own gear I was carrying a shovel and 200 feet of soaking wet rope). The snow that was covering the moraine was soft as hell and reflected the bloody afternoon rays like a mirror. Needless to say we got lost for a while, but we found the trail in the end. By the time we made it down to the car we had our headlamps on.

After a burger, fries and coke in Bellingham – glorious food – I made it back to Fremont, a shower and a very worried girlfriend at 2.30am. After almost 24 hours of continuous climbing, walking and moving.

While we were in the car on the way back, Matt told me that the Coleman Glacier route is considered to be as difficult as Rainier (albeit shorter by 4000 feet). So the first Cascade volcano of my career turned out to be a worthy one too.

Cheers,
Leon.

P.S. A couple of days after returning to Seattle, my face was unusually red and I had blisters on my lower lip. Matt and Laura went to the doctor with second degree burns from both wind and sun. As I finish writing this over a week later my lip still bleeds and I have two weeks to get ready for Forbidden Peak. I can hardly wait.

Comments? Email Leon.
Abuse? Email Keith.