Hi. This is Evan and I'm at the Boulder Glacier Trailhead and over the next two and a half days
we'll be summiting Mount Baker.
I'm here with the Spokane Mountaineers.
This is our graduation climb.
It's over Memorial Day weekend.
Today, we'll be hiking up to the first camp which is about four miles and 2,500 feet of elevation gain.
So, we get to go through a bog and do some class three scrambling, so it should be pretty interesting.
And then tomorrow at 1 am, we'll be starting our summit climb.
So it'll be a good two and a half days.
And we'll be filming along the way.
Mount Baker is located in the northwest of Washington state.
It is part of the North Cascades and is the third highest mountain in Washington.
It has a height of 10,781 feet.
Highlighted in red on the map, you're able to see the trail we took on our first day
through an old growth forest to our base camp on Boulder Ridge.
From the Boulder Ridge base camp, the plan is to make an alpine start at 1 am and make our way to the summit.
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At 9:00 am two teams from the Spokane Mountaineers started the hike to base camp.
"All right. Baker on three. One. Two. Three."
"Baker!"
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All right, we're one mile into the trail. 410 feet of elevation gain so far.
It's just been going through a old forest. It's pretty nice.
Haven't made it to the bog yet, but should be coming up soon.
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As we continue to gain elevation the trail started to disappear under the snow.
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We spotted the bog through the trees on the way to our base camp.
"Can't wait for the bog. The bog's definitely the highlight of this trip right here for me."
Luckily, there is still a lot of snow covering the bog and it was easy to cross over.
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As we made our way out of the bog we started to get better views of Mount Baker.
"See that like that on the very, the very high point right there."
"We're gonna skirt underneath that. Either directly underneath it but probably skirt underneath the rock just underneath that cornice."
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We just popped out of the trees not too long ago.
We're getting some great views of Mount Baker.
It's real warm outside. Feeling a little hot on the snow.
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All right, we just got to the scramble part of the trail.
We'll see how it goes.
There was a rope tethered to a tree to assist climbers into section.
It seemed a lot easier scrambling up the rocks than when we had to come down a few days later.
Everybody made it up the scramble portion of the trail and we reached Boulder Ridge.
Boulder Ridge was a great place to set up camp.
So we've made it to camp we hiked four miles of 2200 feet of elevation gain.
Everybody's setting up their camp right now.
Got a great view of Mount Shuksan and then behind me we got Mount Baker,
which we'll be ascending in the middle of night.
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A kitchen was built in camp to accommodate the two teams to cook food and boil water.
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So we'll be leaving for the summit around 1 am. There's 5,600 feet of vert and it should take about six hours.
The weather has been awesome today. It was raining just yesterday and the day before,
but we got lucky with the the weather break and looking great for tonight and tomorrow.
So we should be able to do it.
The route is that we'll come up here.
Go across here.
Head up here.
And then go to the summit right there .
As the sun set we prepared our gear for the next day and tried to get some sleep.
All right. Just after 1 am. Just roping up. Getting ready to go.
"Yeah, we are!"
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"Good to go"
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So on this climb we have three groups, 11 people.
So we have two groups of four and one group of three.
It's going pretty well so far.
Just taking the layer off.
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"How's everyone doing? Is everybody eating food?"
"Well, I'm gonna eat something now."
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Along the way in the morning there was a climber that wasn't feeling great that went back to base camp.
So we switched up teams and we had one group of five and another group of four
All right. We're two miles in 2,400 feet of elevation gain and starting to get light out.
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We had an amazing sunrise that made the mountains look very colorful.
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We did cross some small crevasses along the way.
I didn't take video on the way up, but I did take it on the way down.
They look like they went down pretty deep and they were small enough to jump over.
"All right. Ready?"
"One. Two. Three"
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We've been hiking for over seven hours now
with the 3.7 miles and 4,800 feet of elevation gain.
Almost there. A lot of work.
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Eight hours and 20 minutes of hiking. We did 5,200 feet.
And we're almost at the summit.
This last stretch has been pretty steep.
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"How's the summit?"
"Good?"
"It was great."
"You can see so much man."
We saw the other Spokane Mountaineers team as they went down and we went up.
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Final push to the summit.
In this section we had to kick in hard with our crampons and use our ice axe.
So we just summited Mount Baker.
It has a height of 10,781 feet.
Everybody made it. Looking good.
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So there's a summit of Mount Baker behind me.
It took nine hours 5,600 feet of elevation gain.
We all made it. Ready to head back to camp and eat something good.
So be sure to hit that like button and subscribe to our channel.
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On the way down we had some ideal conditions for glissading,
which is sliding down steep slopes and made descending a lot faster and a lot funner.
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