Mt Baker – Part 2, North Ridge

It’s hard to know where to start on this one…  The first time I climbed this mountain on a snowboard this year was a walk in the park.  This was madness, and awesomeness, and truly epic.

We’ll just start at the beginning.

Friday I got a call with people feeling wishy washy about the weather and also the fact that 1 guy had a work emergency.  Since he was not able to go, I immediately called Alan and got him on board to go.  I had wanted him to go from the start, but teams of 2 were required for this climb so I was stoked that it worked out.  I then convinced everyone that I had seen that exact same weather forecast earlier in the year and it ended up being the most perfect awesome weather.  As we drove up in the clouds and mist I retained my ever optimistic attitude about the weather and the climb for the weekend.  The joke in the car was that we only had a 40% chance of success. We hiked up through the clouds in yet another beautiful alpine meadow to our camp.  I felt FANTASTIC.  Legs were never burning and I could go as fast as I wanted.  After making camp we sat and watched the sky clear up to perfect sunny skies and a full spread of stars at night – as I promised!

The route came into view – the snow ramp starting left and going up to the summit on the right.

After a pretty restless night of not sleeping much and thinking about my speeches for upcoming weddings, we woke around 2:15am and started climbing @ 3am. There are no pictures or words to describe the insane crevasse navigation that we did for the rest of the day.  We started off in the dark and spent MUCH time trying to find a passable way across the glacier.  We did 1 crossing of a snow bridge where we decided we had to either turn back in 2 hours after crossing or we might not get back across if we didn’t continue on.  We DID continue on and after 3-4 hours we still had not even gotten close to the base of the ice pitches.  In early season, it can take only 2 hours to cross the glacier up to the ice.  We still had HOURS more to go before reaching it.  We continued traversing around left around the bottom of the north ridge and then up.  The crevasses did NOT let up and we ended up actually climbing up and over a few of them.  Some of which were slightly overhanging near the top.

The base of the ice pitches middle,top center – North Ridge.

 

Wes leading up and over a crevasse.

We started making some good upward progress and had to climb through some terrible chossy loose scree.  The goal the whole time was not to take each other out with rock slide/fall.  After the rocks we took our first break of the day (I think at least 6 hours after we started).

Next up was a bunch of steep, steep snow climbing and some ice as well in sections.  The tools were out and “we’re climbing now!”  After a bunch of simul-climbing we arrived at the base of the “real” ice pitches.  Wes and Nick set off leading out the pitches as Alan and I followed in our first time ice climbing (and at 9K ft).  After Wes and Nick got to the top of the first pitch, we watched a small avalanche peel off to the right side of the exact thing we were climbing up.  Scary.  I also had to take the moment to take yet another epic crap on the side of the mountain.  I couldn’t keep it in any longer and felt like a new person after!  Alan was not super thrilled since he was sitting right next to me, haha.

 

Ice climbing is tough!  Breathing super hard during the ice pitches.  The first pitch was sweet.  The ice is supposed to be 60-70 degree tops, but the second pitch was straight up 90 degrees. The 3rd pitch eased off and then it turned to super loose steep snow.  This made the going pretty slow as we short pitched through the top of the longer than expected upper section of the north ridge.  We finally arrived to the traverse section and moved back to everyone on 1 rope team.  We could see some faint boot tracks from previous climbers earlier in the season.  BUT, the mountain was rapidly changing.  We watched another massive serac go flying off the top of the mountain to the right again.  Back to crevasse navigation mode.  We simuled down and back up a steep section.  As we were, we could see where the route went way across the other side.  There was another possible sketchy snow bridge.  At this point Wes said, “alright guys, if this doesn’t go, we have to seriously consider building a snow cave and calling for help.”  Me being the of course ever optimist said, “It’ll go!”  We traversed over, checked it out and sure enough it was solid enough to cross.  Nick said, “we have to start listening to David, he’s been right about everything all day!”  After a bit more climbing and 1 more no go bridge, we finally arrived at the summit at 6pm!  Unbelievable.  Last time it took us 4.5 hour to reach the summit.  This time it took 15 hours.  We stopped and ate/drank all feeling VERY thankful because the route down the other side is much, much easier.  Descending our route we came up would have been extremely dangerous and maybe not doable.  I think that route is probably not doable by now and for sure by this weekend.

This is pretty much our only picture from ice pitches to the summit.  We were way too focused on getting the job done.

The descent was straight forward but slower than I wanted to go.  Everyone was wiped, including me, but I felt pretty decent and excel going down in snow.  We trudged back down to camp right at dark (9pm).

 

This is the only descent pic.

We packed up and began the hike back down to the car.  There is a section of trail that is not really a trail, but a scramble up a waterfall-like area.  In the dark, under our current fatigue state, we could not find it.  We wandered around looking at the useless GPS trying to find the correct ridgeline for 1.5-2 hours!  Just as I was about to pull out my sleeping bag and call it a night, we found the trail.  We hiked out and made it back to the car around 1-2am.  We had officially been awake for an entire day (and close to 2 full days since I didn’t sleep much the night we camped).  Total climb time was about 22 hours.  I arrived home at 5am in time to see Wynter getting ready for work.  I only slept like 4 hours and then went to work.  EPIC, epic, epic.

This climb was not at all what I expected, but so much more.  It was absolutely awesome, really fun, and not something I need to do much of again.  Looking back, there wasn’t any time during that I felt scared (my mental armor feels very strong these days) but lots of times worried we may not make it up and have to descend.  I feel like we “got away with it.”  This feels a little too much like rolling the dice which I’m not willing to push.  I too badly want to be around to watch my daughter grow up to put myself in that much objective danger.

Since we did get away with it though….man it feels awesome.  I’m buzzing right now typing it up, thinking about it.  Boom.