Snowboarding Mt Baker

Here on Orcas Island, we see Mt Baker whenever we go to North Beach and look east toward the mainland and whenever we head up the aptly named Mt Baker Road to take the car to the mechanic. We also get a fantastic view of it whenever we take friends and family up to Mount Constitution, the highest point on Orcas Island…

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As a family, we haven’t gotten much closer to it than that. But in the past several weeks, our son and his fellow high schoolers got the chance to attend two optional ski/snowboard trips to the mountain with one of their teachers, Mr. Rivera, along with Mr. Parnell, Pastor Grayson, and a few parent volunteers. Many of the kids jumped at the chance and raised money with a COVID-safe bake sale. Off they went.

I just had to share with you the photos our son came back with. It looks stunningly beautiful and peaceful, and based on how he described it, it sounds like it’s nothing compared to the busy-ness of mountains in the Tahoe area where I worked in my 20s as a ski lift operator (Alpine Meadows). I can’t say from first-hand experience, but I get the sense that Baker is more pristine, more quiet, more remote-feeling. Then again, it’s pandemic times so maybe every mountain is a little more serene than usual.

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It’s a 2-hour ferry wait and ride and a 2½-hour drive from Orcas Island to Mt Baker, or a 10-minute plane ride from Orcas to Bellingham and a 90-minute drive from Bellingham Airport to the mountain. The kids were so fortunate to experience the latter.

Our son had the time of his life on both trips…until he went down hard on an icy patch and broke his wrist on the second trip. Mr. Rivera took him to the emergency room and looked after him as well as I could have, as we were an ocean-crossing away. Our son even attended his first scheduled driver training Zoom while being splinted by a nurse in the hospital. The experience didn’t taint his feelings about the trips; he can’t wait to go back and snowboard again.

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Despite broken bones, we are so thankful to everyone who made this possible for the kids! I love that they all went the extra mile to make special memories for them.

I knew nothing about Mt Baker until this moment, researching it on Wikipedia. I’ve learned so many interesting things that I will condense for you (from here):

• Mt Baker is also known as Koma Kulshan from the Native Lummi Qwú’mə Kwəlshén. In Native Nooksack it is called Kw’eq Smaenit or Kwelshán.
• It is 10,781 feet (3,286 meters), the 3rd highest mountain in Washington, and the 5th highest in the Cascade Range, which extends from British Columbia to Northern California (Mt Rainier is the highest, at 14,411 feet, then come Mt Shasta, Mt Adams, Mt Hood, and Mt Baker).
• Mt Baker is one of the snowiest places in the world.
• In 1999, the world record for snowfall in a single season was set at Mt Baker Ski Area – 1,140 inches, or 95 feet!
• It has the second most thermally active crater in the Cascade Range after Mt St. Helens.
• Mt Baker has the second heaviest glacier cover after Mt Rainier in the Cascade Range volcanoes.
• The volume of snow and ice on Mt Baker (0.43 cubic miles) is greater than that of all other Cascades volcanoes combined, minus Mt Rainier.
• Indigenous peoples have known the mountain for thousands of years. In the Lummi language, qwú’mə means “white sentinel” and kwəlshén means “puncture wound” (crater). In the Nooksack language, kw’eq sámit means “white mountain.”
• Spanish explorer Gonzalo Lopez de Haro mapped it in 1790 as Gran Montaña del Carmelo, which was the first written record of the mountain.
• British explorer George Vancouver renamed the mountain after Joseph Baker, 3rd Lieutenant of HMS Discovery, who saw it in 1792. (The HMS Discovery was the lead ship in Vancouver’s 1791-1795 expedition exploring the west coast of North America.)
• Vancouver’s journal entry of the moment Baker saw it: “…the high distant land formed, as already observed, like detached islands, amongst which the lofty mountain, discovered in the afternoon by the third lieutenant, and in compliment to him called by me Mount Baker, rose a very conspicuous object…apparently at a very remote distance.”
• By the 1850s, Mt Baker was a well-known feature on the horizon for explorers and fur traders traveling in the Puget Sound region.
• The first governor of Washington Territory, Isaac Stevens, wrote this about Mount Baker in 1853: “It is visible from all the water and islands…[in Puget Sound] and from the whole southeastern part of the Gulf of Georgia, and likewise from the eastern division of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It is for this region a natural and important landmark.
• Edmund Coleman, on his third attempt to climb the mountain and scale the summit, reached the top of Mt Baker in August of 1868 (their route: the Middle Fork Nooksack River, the Marmot Ridge, the Coleman Glacier, and the north margin of the Roman Wall).
• Recent and ongoing studies of Mt Baker include gravimetric and GPS-based geodetic monitoring, fumarole gas sampling, tephra distribution mapping, new interpretations of the Schriebers Meadow lava flow, and hazards analyses. Mapping of Carmelo and Sherman craters and studies of the eruptive history continue as well. An archive is maintained online by Mount Baker Volcano Research Center.
• There are 11 named glaciers on Mt Baker – Coleman being the largest at 1,285 acres – and all of them retreated from 1900-1950, advanced from 1950-1975, and have been retreating with increased rapidity since 1980.
• Mt Baker is drained on the north by streams that flow into the North Fork Nooksack River, on the west by the Middle Fork Nooksack River, and on the southeast and east by tributaries of the Baker River. Lake Shannon and Baker Lake are the largest nearby bodies of water, formed by two dams on the Baker River.

Happy kitchen-table travels, from me to you!

Photos from the plane and on the mountain by Evan Kulper; photos in the ER by Andy Rivera