August 21, 2005; Boulder-Park Cleaver

Rumors of the demise of the PNW ski season have proven grossly exaggerated, as usual.  

Someone once said, "Discretion is the better part of valor." (Actually, it was my father who said this--at every opportunity, a minimum of three or four times a day.) I'm not notably prone to hysteria and panic in the face of a certain degree of objective hazard, but even so I judged that solo forays onto unfamiliar terrain during a season which has already yielded more crevasse falls among my acquaintances than did the previous 8 or 10 might prove hazardous, unjustifiably valorous....or perhaps unwisely indiscreet. Given the paucity of seasonal snow and the recent excesses of sun and heat, I thought it best that I enlist at least one other person in pursuit of turns on Mt. Baker's Boulder-Park Cleaver route this weekend. I therefore partnered with Jerry, the only person convinced by my mass emailing to meet me Sunday morning at the Boulder Ridge trailhead.  I had never met Jerry, but I'd admired his trip reports from afar during years before there ever was a turns_all_year.com.  We introduced ourselves, fussed a bit with our gear, and set off up the trail.

Jerry kept pace without apparent effort through the old growth, across the swamp and up the steep climbers' path, and he led the rope-assisted, class four scramble onto the ridge.  Unfortunately, he was then emphatically waylaid by some sort of stomach virus and had to turn back before we even reached the snow.  After a brief discussion, I cached rescue gear, rope and camera, and soldiered on for a while.  Alone, I tried to play it safe (although not too safe); this entailed turning back 1500 feet before I'd intended, around 7600 feet, yielding a perfectly respectable 2100 vertical foot descent (broken, however, by a couple of 50 foot carries, including one across a section of dirty blue ice for which I was glad to be carrying crampons). In Kam-speak, this is a J.O.M. of 2100/4900, or 43%; hardly worth bragging about.  On the other hand, it's late August, with 7000 foot snow levels forecast for next week, so this might have been my last chance to hike so far for adequate coverage until, oh, say, next August.

That one icy section aside, skiing was great: smooth corn at moderate pitch, with dirt as usual along the cleaver but surprisingly clean snow elsewhere.  Suncups were under an inch deep and very soft; runnels occasionally exceeded a couple of inches, but were mostly quite small, too.  Crevasses were mainly innocuous;  there are, however, a couple of large ones open, including one of the sort which shows a foot or two of width on the surface but which turns out to be undercut 10 feet on either side, with thin bridges of last winter's snows thinly covering a functionally bottomless abyss. One crossing looked sufficiently threatening so that I doubt I'd cross it unroped in another week or two.

Miscellaneous notes: the day was hot, and I ran out of water (±4 liters in ten hours).  This meant no ibuprofen (harsh on an empty stomach), and little food aside from those deadly little Orange GU packets.  The hike through the woods on the way out was at least twice as long as it had been on the way in; it also included a great many ups and downs which had not been present just 10 hours earlier, and lots of grabby saplings which wrapped themselves rudely around my skis and boots at every opportunity.  The mosquitoes and flies were not bad aside from those at the trailhead parking lot itself (where they must have some sort of selective breeding advantage related to the presence of occasional climbers and skiers). From the Boulder Glacier, all the way down into the woods, Verizon (but not T-Mobile) offers good cell coverage.  The fixed rope at the ridge, which was looking pretty tatty last year, has been replaced with a brand new one by an unidentified kind soul.

I was again struck by the wonderful scenery and the glorious isolation on that side of the mountain; Jerry and myself aside, there was just one other car in the parking lot, its two climbers hardly even visible against the mass of Mt. Baker, all rock and ice and deep blue sky.