Every mountaineer probably has a few peaks in their life that conjure up special memories. One of mine is Mount Baker, up in Washington State. I kind of grew up with it. What I mean is that during all of my high-school years, I lived in a town called Mission, in British Columbia, Canada. It was a town of 5,000 people, much of its economy revolving around the forest products industry. The thing is, Mission was only 7 miles from the U.S. border, and all the intervening ground between the town and Mt. Baker was relatively low. The views of Baker from the town are so good that Missionites have always thought of the mountain as their own, even though it’s in a different country. You could see the mountain from almost anywhere in our town, and it was spectacular. Covered in glaciers, it was snowy-white and impressive any time of year. Here is a recent picture I took, using a bit of telephoto.
I never set foot on it the entire time I was there attending high school, but I often thought it would be an amazing experience. In time, I moved 50 miles away to Vancouver to attend university. Even from that much farther away, the mountain could still be plainly seen on a clear day.
The years rolled by, and 1967 arrived. I fancied myself quite the climber by then, as I had been going into the mountains for five years by that time. My room-mate, George, was a geological engineering student and I was a geology student. Our field work had also raised our comfort level with being in wild places. Near the year’s end, we had hatched a plan to climb Mt. Baker – what’s more, we would do it over our Christmas break, in the dead of winter. Pretty gutsy for a couple of 20-year-olds, in retrospect.
We had both gone to spend the holidays with our parents – that done, George made the trip from Summerland, in the Okanagan Valley, down to Mission, a distance of about 250 miles. He arrived on December 28th, having borrowed an old panel van from his father. We prepared our gear and were ready to go. The next morning dawned clear and cold, and away we drove at 7:45 a.m. Crossing the border into the U.S. went without incident, and we soon arrived at the village of Glacier, Washington. I don’t recall how we gathered info on climbing Baker – there was no internet, and we didn’t know anyone who had done it before – but somehow we had a rough idea of how to go about it.
The access we used was a road nowadays called Forest Service road 39. We were able to follow it almost 10 miles, way up into the forest to about 4,300′ elevation. Everything went according to plan, but we couldn’t find the start of the trail that supposedly took off from there. For an hour and a half, we wandered around looking for it – ready to give up in frustration, we finally stumbled upon it at 11:00 a.m.. The woods were deep in snow – we were lucky to have been able to drive all the way to the trailhead. Two more hours on foot brought us to the Kulshan cabin at about 5,000′.
The cabin no longer exists, but what a haven it was back then in the winter of 1967. There were bunks enough to sleep 30 people, and a wood-burning stove with a huge pile of wood that somebody had kindly left there for our use. It was 32 degrees inside the cabin, but a fire we lit in the stove soon had us feeling warmer. After something to eat, we called it a day and crawled into our sleeping bags by 4:30 p.m.
At 5:00 a.m. we got up, ate something and headed outside by 6:15. It was clear and cold. I can’t recall the details now, but I doubt the clothing we wore would have been very high-tech. I owned crampons and ice axe by 1967, and although I don’t think George did, we had begged, borrowed or stolen the same for him. The trees petered out not far above the cabin and then we were out on the unbroken snow and ice slopes. By 11:00 a.m. we had reached the 9100-foot level – there, we found a 10-degree temperature and 40-mph winds. The next 1,500 vertical feet of the route were up a long, unbroken slope. By 12:30, we were part-way up the Roman Wall, at around 10,000 feet, when we decided to call it quits. The details are a bit fuzzy now, almost 46 years on, but I do recall that we were lying on our backs, resting, on the steep slope, thinking how cold and windy it was, and that maybe we wouldn’t have enough time to go the rest of the way to the summit and get back down to the cabin by dark. Hindsight being 20-20, we probably would’ve had enough time to do it safely, but we were young and inexperienced. Better, though, to have erred on the side of caution rather than have made a mistake we would not have lived to regret.
We made it back down to the cabin by 3:00 p.m. and to the vehicle by 4:30. Even stopping for some supper in Glacier, we still made it back to Mission by seven. Wanting to celebrate our adventure, we tried to get into a pub (something we often did) but were kicked out because we were underage. Oh well, it had still been a good day as far as we were concerned.
Years passed. There were a couple of other times I went back to the mountain to try to climb it, but without a partner. Even tried to join up with a roped party on the lower slopes one time, but they prudently turned me down – can’t say I blame them, they didn’t know me from Adam. Went there another time with some fellow climbers to practice crevasse rescue techniques on the lower Coleman Glacier – that was an eye-opener, made me decide to never fall into a crevasse.
The years rolled on by. Late in 1976, December 2nd to be exact, I headed to Mt. Baker again with a guy named Doug Buis from Mission. I had never climbed anything with him before, so I’m not sure why he and I teamed up for this one. Things must have seemed okay with this partnership, though, to head to the mountain in winter conditions. We drove to the end of the road, walked up the trail to the Kulshan cabin, and just kept on going.
After seven hours on foot, we were at 8,850′. I don’t know if it’s still there, but back in the day there was a well-known feature at that level called “the great crevasse” which was known to anyone who had climbed high on the mountain. This thing was an eye-opener, stretching a long way across the slope and creating quite an obstacle at times. The light was fast fading as we stood at the downhill lip of the crevasse, so we did what any sane climber would do – we climbed down into the crevasse to what looked like a fairly solid snow bridge and pitched our tent.
We settled in for the night, but what a night! The winds were merciless. Our thought was that being 20 feet down in the crevasse would get us out of the wind, but we had another think coming. Thankfully, it wasn’t that cold, only down to +18F overnight. Between the tent’s flapping and the spindrift, we didn’t sleep a wink.
The next morning, we were moving by 8:15 a.m., glad to be out of our hell-hole. The weather was perfect – a high thin haze and feeble sunlight. However, the winds were outrageous. Nevertheless, two hours later we stood on the summit. Forty-mile-per-hour winds and a +14-degree temperature greeted us. Steam rose from the crater a thousand feet down the south slope. It felt pretty darn good to finally stand on the summit after ten years of trying.
Five hours later, we were back at the car, and back across the border and home in time for supper. That was 37 years ago, but every time I’m close enough to Mt Baker to see it, I get a grin on my face that you couldn’t wipe off with a baseball bat. It’s a great mountain, always will be. The Kulshan cabin burned down a long time ago, but I’m sure the climb is much the same. Go and try it if you get the chance.
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