Mount Baker, Heliotrope Ridge — Thursday, Mar. 17, 2016

North Cascades > Mount Baker Area

David and I were anxious to finish our goal to climb all Washington's volcanoes within a year, and being homeschooled, we were able to seize a beautiful midweek weather window. The trip involved 15 miles of unanticipated road walking/skiing, seven or eight thousand feet of vert, and a delicious ski descent. After a 4 hour drive from Leavenworth, we reached ROAD CLOSED at the first bridge (~7.5 miles from Heliotrope ridge trail). We left the car at 2pm and, after transitioning to skis about 6 miles in, reached Heliotrope Ridge trail about 5:30pm. We continued skiing up the trail. Stream crossings were acrobatic at times. We left the trail (which we were now only following only by GPS), and skinned straight up a tree-free finger to the right of the trail. We dug in and camped around 5,600ft. The next morning we began skinning directly upward with headlamps and crampons ~4:30am, using waypoints on the GPS to guide us in the dark. Interestingly, the West horizon never gets dark due to all the city lights. The moon rose before the sun, and we skied by moonlight across the Coleman glacier. By now we had roped up, though crevasses never were an issue—we only saw two anywhere near the route. Easy route-finding up the Colman Glacier to the col (French for "pass") North of Colfax that marks the base of Pumice Ridge. Due to icy conditions, we left our skis a few hundred feet up from here and climbed the rest of the way in our boots (no crampons) and using our black diamond raven pro aircraft-grade-aluminum-less-than-2-pounds-you-need-to-by-one-of-these ice axes. We quickly reached the level summit and swaggered over to the nol at the north end that is the true summit. After freezing my precious piano fingers taking summit and goal-complete shots, we tromped down the Roman Wall back to our skis, and a few icy turns brought us to sweat wind-affected stuff on Colman Glacier. We took time to explore around on the way down, finding two crevasses away from the standard route up the Coleman Glacier. We found a monstrous blue-ice block (~45ft high?) that would have made for rad ice climbing practice had I brought foot crampons or my pair of Alien axes. We started cruising left (South) and covered a lot of distance thanks to gravity. The only slightly unnerving part was on the last 500 vertical feet above our tent, when we were jumping back and forth on this ridge/snowdrift structure, and I zoomed across this bowl, causing small bits of snow to slide down, which continued to gather more snow till, looking back up, I saw 8-10ft cylindrical snowballs approaching at probably 18mph. Some broke apart due to the centripetal acceleration, but the pieces just formed new snowballs. That's what we skiers call "rollers," and it means a wet-slide avalanche is waiting to happen. That miniature bowl was the steepest part of the descent, was purely optional, and could easily be avoided. From the bottom, we actually saw the debris from a wet-slide that had occurred while we were chasing the frozen summit. I guess it's a good thing we got an early start up what was then icy crunch. After packing up, we skied down Heliotrope Ridge trail, finding that the lower portion had melted so much during our trip that many stretches and stream-crossings had changed status from "slightly bothersome" on skis to foot travel only. We skied the lowest portion of the trail out to the road and down for a mile before packing the skis out to the car, literally jogging at ~5 mph nearly all the way. We left at 9:30pm for a long, sleepy drive back to Leavenworth. If you liked this, please feel free to check my other trip reports by clicking my name at the top. Happy trails! Daniel Tveten