July 22-23, Boulder Glacier, Mt. Baker

Paul was chased off the Boulder Glacier approach early in the month by lightning, and he's more of a glutton for fun hiking than me, as he was in touch about a return trip the next week. Unfortunately it took us until this weekend to mobilize, which turned out to be a little late.

What can you say about a 90 degree pseudo-bushwhack approach with swarming, biting black flies, mud and tons of blowdown? Maybe there's a reason people were pointing their fingers at our ski rack and laughing on the way up to Baker Lake.

Once we reached running water at around 5,030 ft. and the sun went down, the weather was perfect for camping. We slept half out of our bags in perfect comfort, got up at around 3:45, and started skinning from camp an hour later. We had decided on the more heavily crevassed central portion of the Boulder Glacier, as that seemed to be the most exciting skiing as opposed to the smoother climber's left glacier or the Boulder-Park Cleaver that seems to get the most traffic.

We roped up and switched from skis to crampons at around 7,000 ft. where the route finding began to get convoluted. Many of the crevasses on the route had lower lips that were higher than their upper lips, thereby hiding them from our view from camp the evening before, so the route that looked like it should go was more stop-and-go.

We were stopped by un-crossable crevasses at 8,500 ft and 8,800 ft, then encountered a thin snowbridge that I thought would go at 9,030 ft. Paul had me on belay, but I lost my nerve about halfway across when I was able to see clearly how undercut it was and turned around. Michael and Paul had similar feelings of doubt, especially as we were still unsure if the route would go above. We downclimbed a bit and took a lunch break, and as we had already spent hours on dead-end-runs and everyone in the group had been on top of Baker, made the decision to ski. Downclimbed a bit more through some exposed sections with uphill traverses, and put skis on a little over 8,000 ft.

Very nice corn snow conditions down to camp, then a re-run of the hot and sweaty hike back to the car. After falling off the trail the second time into the bushes I decided to come back earlier next year when we can skin from lower in the creek drainage.


Shuksan