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Baker, North Ridge


CascadeClimber

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  • 3 weeks later...
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Aidian (did I spell that right? :-))

Here's some info from a friend who did it last weekend:

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It was a real pain to get across the Roosevelt glacier --- very dark, because of clouds, and we got about 500' too high, so had to descend, then the last several hundred feet up to the route seemed impassible... tried forever, and finally got through with some religious bridge crossings and jumps. A couple years ago it took us 1.5 hours to get to the base of the climb, this time it took over 4 hours! (was getting so late, 8am, that we almost turned around).

Mostly we were above the bad weather by this time.

We did the direct start, which (because there wasn't much snow) ends in scree/rock rather than snow/ice.

The ice arrete was in funky shape too -- on the mellow side of the arete it was slushy-corn-ice-that-doesn't-take-a-screw, and on the the steep (right hand out of the sun) side it was ok. So we wandered left and right: left for the easier climbing, right to place the screws. good fun.

Above the arete the weather came in -- couldn't see much of anything. The seracs near the summit were a real surprize to me, I didn't remember seeing them from below, so I was a little confused. Looking up at them in the fog through my polarized sunglasses, the first one looked like a gigantic north-face-of-everest-5km-high-made-of-cracked-rock. I took off my glasses and couldn't see it anymore, so I decided it was funny-icky-weather-clouds.

Then suddenly the fog let up for a second and we realized it was an ice serac --- 50m tall of something, but only 5m away from us (which is why it looked 5km tall). The crevasse crossing to get around that thing on the right was the scariest crossing --- not difficult, just frightening cause you could see the light coming up through the snow below you for metres and metres.

Lots of people on the summit (1pm), but we were alone on the ridge. It took 5 hours from the lower icefield to summit, so in the end it was ok in terms of time, after wasting so much on the Roosevelt.

 

The Coleman-deming descent is in really excellent shape (regardless of the warnings from the ranger). We descended it at 1pm, and it would have been ok to descend any time of day (even though it hadn't frozen overnight for us).

 

 

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