May 13, Mt. Baker, windy summit via CD

Summited Baker yesterday via the CD. Left the car ~2 miles short of Helio TH. The E winds were transporting loads of snow with huge plumes off of the Roman Nose and the North Ridge. Witnessed a small but impressive natural snow avalanche come off the Coleman Headwall caused by the rapid loading. Some powder on the Coleman, but the Roman Wall had been blasted into an unpleasant rime-coated, unpredictably breakable crust.

There is an enormous snowpack up there, and we only saw one crevasse on our whole route, a bit climber's left of our path and appx 200m (linear) below the saddle. Pretty spooky. Glacier travel should be undertaken with extra caution in the coming weeks as the huge snowpack consolidates and the crevasses open up in rapid and unexpected ways.


Skied from Grant Peak under building high clouds, and returned to the car 8,200' vert below. The road should melt out a lot further pretty quickly, its becoming a mess of discontinuous snow-mo ruts.

Noted tons of sno-mo activity on the Easton/Squak side, some of whom were beyond the rec area boundary, in the crater. Also a bit of machine traffic in upper Grouse Creek and Warm Creek zones.