May 19, 2012, Baker, Davenport's Ring of Fire

On May 18th I rolled up to the Mt. Baker ski area parking lot to hook up with Davenport and McMillan's Ring of Fire team & catch them on their last summit. I didn't get up to the Baker lot until late in the day thinking the crew might be taking a rest day with the weather not being that nice along with seeing Chris fighting a cold that was peaking the day prior on his 11 hour round trip tour to Rainier's summit (via the Fuher Finger). When I arrived the team was out on Ptarmigan Ridge (yep on a down day, or should I say, "a no volcano summit day." - ha ha ha) getting a nice look at the super long approach to the Park Head-wall. Once back at the Heather Meadows lot the team decided to head back down SR542 for Glacier Creek to see how far up they could get the Spyder land yacht. Turns out it wouldn't have been far. However, Just before the Glacier Creek turn off, Chris notice the old defunct RV lot, which was best know for the old Chando Restaurant. The owner  just happened to be on site and is in the process of selling the R.V. lot , so he told Chris they could plug in for 10 bucks. Super cool!



We had a nice dinner sitting on the grass with the last of the day's sunshine, hit the sack early and we all were leaving the vehicles a mile before the TH between 6-6:30AM. We hit Grouse Creek in the morning shade with a nice steep, not to mention long, frozen granular pitch up to the Coleman Glacier, so I opted to go with boot crampons the entire way up the deviator. Once to the Coleman it was back to skinning w/ ski crampons. As I was half way across the long Coleman traverse, I notice a large group heading up the Roman Wall and sure enough it was the entire crew along with our very own Andrew Eckels getting his first Baker summit along with some summit great summit video clips too.

Looking back down the Roman Wall - photo by Chris Davenport


Chris and Jess almost to the summit


The Ring of Fire team took a short lunch and dropped down the frozen Roman Wall, then hit hard skiers' right at the bottom of the Roman wall for some steep skiing. Halfway decent snow on the long traverse(but still too variable to rip it in comfort)hitting all the steep pitches we could get on the skiers' left, then it was off to harvest some great corn back down towards the Shark's fin. The last long pitch down to Grouse Creek was Epic.

Jess getting the Spring goods


Here is a link for the video of the day http://thesnowtroopers.com/2012/mt-baker-wa-final-ring-of-fire-summit/