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[TR] Mt. Baker - North Ridge Climb, Coleman Deming Ski 8/15/2010


AlpinWeiss

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Trip: Mt. Baker - North Ridge Climb, Coleman Deming Ski

 

Date: 8/15/2010

 

Trip Report:

Inspired by recent trip reports of this route we headed up it on Sunday. It's a beautiful route with some great alpine aesthetics. The wildflowers are out in force on Heliotrope which makes for some pretty camping.

 

I'll keep this brief since there are other TRs with more detail:

 

The "Hourglass" couloir which provides the shortcut route to the face has a big bergschrund open these days. It's probably possible to get around it but it looks sketchy. We took another shortcut just a little further towards the ridge which involved a little loose rock but saved a ton of time over going all the way to the lower part of the ridge:

 

4897588579_dc575595e6_z.jpg

 

4898221160_f2e5baff42_b.jpg

 

Up high the ice was ok: some good stuff, some slurpee consistency. There's a pitch an a half (90m) of real ice if you go the left (aka easy) variation. From there it's all snow.

 

We left at 4am, were at the base of the ridge at 7:30 and the base of the ice at 10:30. Summitted at 2pm and skied down on soft corn.

 

The ski down the CD was great - I had been starting to forget how much I like skiing. We took off the skis for to get over a little rock on Pumice ridge but otherwise skied straight to camp at 6,000'. There's some fun skiing over little crevasses down below Colfax.

 

 

Gear Notes:

We took 6 screws and used 5 of them (3 on pitch + anchor) - depending on your confidence on ice you could take more or less. Picket anchor on top of 2nd pitch.

 

 

 

Approach Notes:

Skis + boots on the back = heavy

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Some more climb notes:

We were hoping to put on skis/skins from camp, but there were some icy bits + crevasses so we carried them instead. In the last 700' or so of (snow) climbing, the snow softened up enough that we were doing some postholing. Fortunately we got to put on skins + skis for the last hundred yards or so.

Also, Fritschi binding brakes poking you in the back == no fun.

 

Our GPS track: Mt Baker NR and CD track

 

The wildflowers were amazing!

 

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We did this route on Sat. Aug 14th with pro guides. Had trouble getting across the glacier to the base of hourglass, had to double back lower. We passed schrund by starting left and traverse under rock band out to hour glass. We had good snow and ice conditions on route. descent was soft and crevases have started to open. screws and pickets

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