On May 15 we drove north from Rainier to climb and ski Mount Baker after a week of skiing and playing with friends!
But First, what we learned Tom!!
- Well Bob, it is very easy to get off route early on. FOLLOW THE SNOWMACHINES and you will stay on track
- You can get all the way up top on skis if you have ski crampons
- About half the people were roped up, we heard of people popping through snow bridges that day and the day before so it seemed like pretty easy insurance to rope up on the glacier
- Expect to walk a mile or two up the road to the trailhead due to snow on the road
- Road camping here seemed pretty okay
We planned on climbing Baker via the Easton Glacier Route and rolled up to the trailhead in the early evening. To our surprise there was still snow on the road a couple miles from the trailhead so we already knew we would have a particularly large day in the morning. We made dinner and waited for our friends Emily Sullivan and Sam Volk who were planning on doing the climb with us. We didn’t have any service here so by the time they rolled in at 8:30PM we had been worried sick! As it turned out they had an epic of a day that day and would probably not be joining for our big day the next morning, but hoped to see us on the mountain on our way down!
Our alarm went off at 4:20AM (niiiiice) on Sunday morning and we quickly rolled out of the car and butt chugged some 5 hour energy and Monsters and were skinning up the road by 5AM, absolutely HUMMING from all the caffeine! The snow on the road was a bit patchy so we did the whole take your skis off and on again bit a few times, but after a couple miles we finally made it to the “real” trailhead. We followed the well established skin track out of the parking lot and after a couple more miles the skin track started to fade and split off in a bunch of different directions. We were also way off of the GPS track we were following so we knew we were pretty lost at this point.
The new mission was trying to find the actual trail, we were hoping the GPS track would lead us there but we didn’t know that for sure. We dropped down about 100 feet into a giant riverbed and skied over snow bridges down river until we intersected the actual trail. This detour added at least 500 extra feet and an hour to our day and definitely took the wind out of our sails since we knew that the day was going to be tiring enough as it was.
We eventually intersected with a giant snow machine trial which turns out IS THE TRAIL YOU WANT TO FOLLOW THE WHOLE WAY! They know the way, seriously! Around treeline, the summer trail splits off and heads up a ridge on your left, but in the winter it is much easier to continue heading up the drainage with all the snowmachiners.
Around 6-7K we roped up, it was really warm out and people had been popping through snow bridges that weekend. We were also carrying the rope anyway and also you look cool roped up 😉
We followed the main track up the glacier, the route probably slightly changes every year but our wrapped around the main icefall on the Easton Glacier on lookers left.
At about 9k we got to a cool little fumarole below the final headwall where most people strapped skis to their back, we decided to try and skin up the headwall with ski crampons and it was pretty doable! We got to a flat area that we thought was the top but then we asked another guy if it was the top and he informed us that the top was actually “over there”. After a quick candy break we skinned across the ridge and up the little summit nipple, took a very quick selfie because it was windy, and kind back to the false summit plateau to transition to skis.
The ski down was super great and we got down right as the clouds were starting to roll in. The top 2000’ was perfect corn skiing but the bottom 5000’ was pretty soft and sloppy, Oh Well!!
Once we hit the flats we still had about 4-5 miles to get back to the car. This section just ended up being a death march, but we eventually made it, 20 miles, 8600’, and 12 hours later! And to our great surprise, Emily and Sam were waiting at the car for us WITH BEERS! Wahoo!!
