Fun Times on Mt. Baker

Day One

MORE PICTURES OF THE SUMNMIT DAY WILL BE ADDED LATER!

My buddies Josh and I decided to make a last minute climb up Mt. Baker via the Colman Deming route for the 21st and 22nd of July. I met Josh and his brother Michael at their place and practiced Z-pulley for an hour or so before taking off. We arrived at the trailhead at around 11:30 or noon-ish. We quickly made it to the base of the glacier. As we were roping up we talked to an AAI guide and a few of his clients. Wednesday was sunny and clear and we hoped for the same on Thursday. We set up camp and all took naps. There was only one other camp on the hill that day and they had just climbed the North Ridge. We talked with them for a while, made dinner and went to bed. We wanted to wake up at around 3am but only had my IPod for a clock.

Summit Day

When we woke up it was around 3:25. I was feeling pretty antsy because I wanted to get up there before the snow softened. As we were roping up we saw a 2 person rope team headed across the glacier. We briefly talked with them and were probably never 100 yards from them the whole trip. There is a distinctive boot path that leads the whole way to summit plateau and then you kind of lose it. The weather on Thursday was crap. It was windy and foggy and it even snowed a little but it wasn’t that horrible. When we reached the summit plateau we debated with the other team to search for the true summit. Josh said he thought he knew where it was but the hard part would be getting back to the boot path. I recommended flowing two compass barring with an L-shaped turn but one of the guys on the other rope team said he had his GPS. We started walking along the summit plateau and thought we saw the lip of a crevasse. This is not good I thought but as we got closer it was a wind wall for a campsite! After a little while we found some wands and the summit. Aha. I did it. It was easier than I thought it would be. We only spent about 2 minutes on the summit before deciding to “GTFO” as one of the other rope team guys said in “text-speech”. Kids these days… We were being pelted in the face by ice and wind. We stated heading down but were not on the trail. I asked the guy with the GPS what was going on and he said his GPS ran out of batteries. Umm… Thanks for the heads up. We traversed the hill for awhile before we found the boot path and headed down. We made it back to our camp at about 10am packed up and headed down. As soon as we got off the glacier we ran the whole way down. It was a great trip!







EXCUES MY HORRIBLE ENGLISH, I was tired ;)

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