Hello!
One of the stories I promised you last week was about climbing Mt. Baker. Oh, was it ever an adventure! It was a great way to spend the first three days of our honeymoon.
The honeymoon suite!
Jonathan and I got super lucky and it ended up being just the two of us with our guide, Craig. We went through the Northwest Mountaineering School, and they were great to work with! We met Craig at the Sedro-Wooley ranger station early in the morning on July 1st to go through our personal gear and add the group gear to our packs. Once we had everything in or strapped on our backpacks, we drove about an hour to the trailhead and packed everything in. That first day we climbed 3000 feet in four miles. It was a gorgeous trail, with lots of wildflowers, big trees, and amazing views.
The second day was a skills day. We started by learning self-arrest with our ice axes on a steep but short hill with a super gentle runout. This was also our first lesson in assessing the consequences of a slide; in that particular location, you would just slow to a stop at the bottom. There was no consequence. After a couple of tries, climbed up onto the bottom of the glacier proper and practiced walking together on a rope team. When traveling across a glacier, you’re frequently crossing snow bridges over crevasses. In the (wildly unlikely) event that someone punches through a snow bridge, the other people on the rope team fall down and self-arrest using their ice axes. We learned more about the rescue process later – at that moment we were just trying to figure out how to walk while connected by a rope and also while thirty feet apart from each other!
And with crampons on. While I logically appreciate crampons and the fact that I could not have climbed that mountain without them, I am not a fan. I had never used crampons before and I can’t begin to count the number of times I tripped over my own toe spikes or caught one on the lacing of the other. Oy.
We started to head up the glacier to practice crevasse rescue, but it started to rain so we turned around. It was my turn to take a nap in the tent while Jonathan read. After a couple of hours, it dried up a bit and we headed back out.
I won’t go into all the details here, but suffice to say I learned a ton of rope work and how to build anchors with snow pickets or an ice ax and how to build a pulley. It was fascinating! I would need to practice it a lot before I could do it in a stressful situation, but it was really fun to learn about it.
We went to bed early that night because the next day was a big day. Day three was summit day. We had four thousand vertical feet to ascend, and then we had to get back down, pack up, and get back to the car.
We got up at one in the morning, got dressed, ate breakfast, and started climbing at two. We started with all the gear on; harnesses, rope, crampons, helmets, headlamps. Craig was our lead, and Jonathan was in the middle (the logic there is that as the lightest one, I should not be the one to try to catch Craig if he went into a crevasse). This left me on the end of a rope attached to two incredibly fit climbers, stumbling along in the dark after them as fast as I could.
I pushed myself incredibly hard on the climb. There were many times that my legs and lungs were screaming for a break and I just kept going. Night climbing is also an odd experience because you can’t see where you are or where you’re going. Some people really enjoy this; they like being able to focus on the step in front of them. For me, though, I get a lot of satisfaction out of knowing how far I’ve come. There were also several moments that things seemed really steep early on and I was worried I was in way over my head (I was assuming things would get harder the farther up we went, which is generally true on mountains). When I saw the same slope on the way back down, it was way less scary because I could see the whole thing. For most of the climb up, I was cursing my adventurer and promising myself I would not be trying mountaineering again any time soon!
The sky lightened slowly; we made it to the saddle between Mt. Sherman and Mt. Baker sometime near dawn. The sun was behind the mountain from us, and we could see the shadow Mt. Baker cast on the sea of clouds below us. Dawn was absolutely my favorite part of the entire trip. We were across from some crazy knife-edge ridges with wind-blown snow caked on them, and the colors that changed from dusky blue to rose to firey orange and yellow as the sun crested was incredible. Being in that kind of a place with that kind of light is really, really special.
All the colors of sunrise…
And Mt. Baker’s shadow!
The last part of the climb is called the Roman Headwall. It was the steepest, and there was a lot of mental focus on my part to make each step perfect. It was definitely a high consequence fall zone. I also wondered a lot about how on earth we were going to get back down but treated it as an exercise in focus. I would worry about down on the way down. It was, however, my favorite part of the climb because Craig had to go slow enough to kick in decent steps and I could actually breathe!
When we crested over the ridge into the sun, I pretty quickly spotted a hump about a hundred feet above where we were standing. And yes, we climbed that too. We summited Mt. Baker around 6:30 AM, four and a half hours after we started. We were the first ones up, and it was really cool to have it all to ourselves! It was absolutely beautiful from the summit.
We did it!
And it was cold! We descended a little to get out of the wind, put more layers on, and then headed back down. I was not convinced about my crampons’ ability to hold the snow and I kept trying to dig my edges in as if I was on skis, but other than that descending the Roman Headwall was way easier than I anticipated. We paused at the saddle to check out the sulfur vents (Mt. Baker is an active volcano) and have a snack, and then we headed down. Descending in crampons is not my favorite thing, nor is getting pulled by the rope while trying to walk down a hill. I definitely struggled and twisted my knees and ankles around a lot, but I only fell over once!
I also started to realize exactly how big the crevasses were that we were crossing! There was one in particular that we paused to look at that was about a hundred feet wide. The blues and greys of the ice were beautiful. I was somewhere between super excited to get to see a crevasse from the middle like that and completely freaked out that I was on a snow bridge and had crossed said snow bridge in the dark without realizing it.
We got back to camp at 10:45, paused for about fifteen minutes, and then packed everything up. I was exhausted already, but we still had four miles and another three thousand feet to descend.
Am I napping or snacking? Possibly both?
Unfortunately, my left knee was killing me. I’ve screwed it up a couple of times, mostly because of my own stubbornness, and it was not ok with the twisting it had received on the first descent. It was even less happy about having a forty-pound pack on for more descending. I struggled about a third of the way down before Craig and Jonathan took the gear from the outside of my pack. Without crampons, tent poles, the fuel canister, or my ice ax, my pack was way lighter and my knee was mildly less cranky.
This was really embarrassing for me. My parents taught me when I was really young that it was a good thing to carry my own stuff, and not being able to do that was not a good feeling. I can make all sorts of logical arguments about how my pack was a higher percent of my weight that Jonathan’s was (our packs weighed about the same but he weighs more than I do) and that it benefited the whole team when I stopped being stubborn and accepted help…but it still wasn’t fun.
We made it back to the car though, about twelve hours after we originally started climbing. I think twelve hours is the longest I’ve ever walked anywhere. Jonathan and I were both wrecked; we barely managed to shove some pizza in our face and drag our stuff into our AirBnB in Bellingham before we collapsed into bed.
I’m still ambivalent about mountaineering, for a number of reasons. I think part of it definitely has to do with how big that third day was; it would have been easier if I had descended more slowly from the summit or hadn’t had to pack out the same day. I think I could get better at using crampons and more comfortable on a rope team. I liked the physical challenge of climbing and as I mentioned earlier, the glacier and the mountains, especially at dawn, were incredibly beautiful. It was the kind of life-affirming, I am part of the world, awe-filled moments that can shape your life.
That being said, that beauty comes with risk. Mt. Baker is not a particularly risky climb, but we weren’t on a rope team just for fun. We crossed major crevasses and traversed no-fall zones. I don’t know that I need that level of risk to enjoy an adventure. It’s also worth noting, however, that I don’t perceive risks equally. The fact that I had all that gear and that glaciers feel so other-worldly made that feel riskier than the hike out, which followed the very narrow, very crumbly edge of a lateral moraine. That was just as much of a no-fall zone as anything else we did but didn’t seem nearly as scary. I’m still pondering how much risk is fun and how much is simply not necessary. It’s a very personal decision, and I haven’t quite decided yet.
Overall, though, I’m really glad we tried it together. And I could probably be talked into another trip; the pictures of dawn outweigh my memories of struggling.
Your homework: When is it good to push yourself? When is it ok to accept help? How much risk are you comfortable with, and in what situations?
Hej då,
Jamie
A Three Part Woman 