Our climbing team that I mentioned a few posts back (the one that trained in the rain near Alpental) finally had our first real summit bid – Mount Baker via the Easton Glacier. The weather was forecasted to be HOT and sunny, and it did not disappoint in that regard! We set out from Seattle around 6 am and met up with our group, which was two separate camping parties coordinating travel together for a total of 13 people! Big group, some of whom are close friends of mine, and past climbing/skiing buddies, and some who were completely new faces. We hit the trail around 9:30am and followed it up to the first campsite on the snow around 6000 feet. This place was a zoo!
We decided to keep going about 500 feet further and set up camp next to some exposed rock that allowed us to collect running water instead of having to melt snow the entire time.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BGUqFQpIfTi/?taken-by=parkedavid
We set up our tents, gathered water and then Luke and I decided to go check out the runout of the Deming glacier. It was really awe-inspiring to be able to visualize exactly how the glacier flows, and see the blue glacial ice exposed by the huge crevasses.
Luke and I then crawled into his new tent (MSR Hubba Hubba, worked great and was true to the name, btw) and tried to get to sleep around 7 or 8. It was so warm that I slept on top of the sleeping bag with the door and fly of the tent wide open, and passed right out. I woke up naturally just after the sunset and took a sleepy photo through the door of the tent.
When the alarm started ringing at 12:45 am, I looked out and saw SO many stars, and felt a fairly warm breeze. I got so excited that I didn’t even feel tired at this point. If you know me, you know that I hate waking up early, so to be alert and ready to go is saying quite a lot about how beautiful the night was. We quickly ate some “breakfast” and downed some coffee and set up our rope team. I was in a group with Luke, Pete, and Kimber, and we appropriated the name Rope Team Alpha. Rusty, Hanna, and David got to be named Meatflaps, while Vlad, Liz and Leslie termed themselves “Medium-Rare” Eric, Tim and Rich didn’t name themselves as far as I could tell, being much too focused on enjoying the climbing 🙂 Meatflaps took the lead, guiding us up a very lightly crevassed route. I think we crossed about 4 visible crevasses, all of which had solid snow bridges or were about 6 inches wide. Rope Team Alpha followed close behind in second, and Medium-Rare was behind us. Eric’s team brought up the rear, since Tim had a flesh wound that was causing a lot of pain and slowing him down a little bit. The sun started to rise as we approached the crater rim, shining light on Colfax Peak and the Black Buttes.
We all reconvened at the rim, and rehydrated and ate some snacks to prep us for the final push up the Roman wall to the summit plateau.
We reached the summit at about 6:30 or 6:45, 4.5 hours after leaving camp. Not exactly a land speed record, but a good steady safe pace. We lolly-gagged for a bit, taking pictures with our rope team.
I looked down from the summit onto the busy plateau and saw a solo climber with skis on his back “moving with purpose,” as Pete put it. I suspected this was one of my oldest friends Todd, who had mentioned that he would probably be doing a speed run of the same route as us that Sunday. He told us his time from the car to the summit, and after we collected our jaws from the floor, I took a couple of pictures with him and chatted about this and that. Todd is the one who I would consider the most responsible for getting me into backcountry skiing, and put the bug in my ear for alpine climbing and glacier travel, so it was a really cool “full-circle” type of experience to get to meet him on the summit after traveling separately.
We headed down and got to the cars around 1:30, and we all reconvened at the Skagit River Brewery in Mt Vernon for a beer, some food and some REALLY sleepy conversation. I’m going to avoid describing the descent in detail, other than to say that it was balls hot, we had some fun glissades, felt our feet were pounded to the max by the end and coined what I consider to be the best slogan for the trip: Rope Team Alpha doesn’t fuck around…except for when we fuck around!
3rd Washington volcano down! Just Rainier and Glacier left to go.
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