After all these years in the Pacific Northwest and nearly 10 summits of Mount Baker, I had never been up its South side. I had no idea what I’d been missing.
Kelsey and I decided to sleep in our on beds, waking up early Saturday morning to leave town by about 4:30am. The drive was smooth other than the massive potholes on the forest road and we left the car where we had to park about a half mile below the trailhead due to snow and other cars at 6:45am. We followed the old road for a few switchbacks and then headed up through the woods, eventually meeting the trail. This section was mostly snow, but had some dry sections we had to boot. Before too long, we were in open trees and skinning our way efficiently to more open terrain at 4,600 feet.
We were generally moving pretty quickly and got to 5,900 feet where a number of tents had been set up the night before in about 2 hours 25 minutes from the car. From here, it was smooth sailing up the glacier, following a light skin track and a huge number of footprints. A bunch of large, roped parties were walking down by this point, but the snow was thankfully still relatively firm. Soft enough to skin well, but it seemed like it would stay as corn for us on the way down.
The views from this side of the mountain are really awesome—much better than from the standard Coleman-Deming route with the Twin Sisters nearby as well as a panoramic view of the Cascades from Shuksan through The Pickets, and across all the way to Glacier and Rainier.
We kept cruising at a pretty good clip, passing a handful of parties as we went and saying hello. At the edge of the summit crater, we switched to booting since it steepened up a bit and there was a massive boot pack set in already. We never roped up and didn’t need crampons either since the snow was soft. 5 hours and 20 minutes after leaving the car, I was standing on top of Baker, enjoying its stellar views. I met Kelsey at the top of the Roman Wall and, after a quick snack, we started down.
My, oh my. From the top of the Roman Wall until about 7,500 feet was, hands-down, the best corn run of my life. Perfectly smooth with just a couple inches of buttery corn on top, it skied like a dream. We stopped a few times to look at each other in disbelief and whoop.
Things got heavy again, especially for my tiny 176 x 78 under foot skis, from 7,500 feet down a couple thousand feet. We stopped for a half hour at a rock outcropping to take out boots off, soak in the sun, and eat some more food. Below here, especially as we re-entered the trees, the skiing got pretty good again. We video-gamed our way down from here, slalom turning around trees and in stream gullies, eventually making it to the car just under 8 hours after we’d left at 2:45pm.
Many Cascade mountaineering adventures have enough Type-2 fun that you’re glad you did it, but don’t really want to do it again. With this one, I’d go back for sure.