Hello everyone,

A couple of friends and myself considered climbing Baker over the summer but the plan fell apart... Now we all have a bunch of free time next weekend and we are hoping to plan another trip to climb Mt. Baker via the Coleman/Deming route. We would do this next week, sometime between 29th of Oct and the 3rd of November.

We are fairly inexperienced with mountaineering in general... We took a course over the summer in the Columbia Icefield and learned crevasse rescue, glacier travel, rope-skills, however no white-out navigation stuff. I'm not sure if that would be enough to climb this route during this time of year safely.

Some of my concerns are weather, what to expect, how to prepare for it, etc... aswell as the very real danger of avalanches, and crevasses.

I guess to begin with I'm just looking for some opinions on wether or not this is a safe, viable thing to do with our amount of skill and experience.

Cheers,
-Eric D.

Forecast for next week doesn't look like good climbing weather: snow.
Week after that, hard to say at this point, but, I think that we, and the mountain, are moving into winter weather here very soon.
Keep checking the forecast.

Thanks for the quick response, I figured that it would rely heavily on the weather, even though it isn't a major peak.

Yep, time is now, weather is perfect. Wish I were out there.

Wading through snow isn't a huge issue for us... We'll just take it slow and maybe add another night on the mountain. Avy danger though is definitely a concern... Think I'll try to convince my friends out of it.

If the weather evolves as forecasted, Baker will not be a good place to be next week. In fact, if this weekend's weather happens to be the beginning of the storm cycle, then you're probably going to have to wait until at least December to get another good window. November and April are probably the most difficult months to summit the NW volcanoes. There is usually only a few good weather/conditions windows for climbing the volcanoes (Baker, Glacier, and Rainier) in the winter season in the PNW. I consider the winter season (for the sake of this discussion) to start when the storm cycle does.

To answer your original question, "wether or not this is a safe, viable thing to do with our amount of skill and experience." I'd say if you have to ask that question, probably not.

Thanks for the honest responses, safety first always.

Guess I'll be pulling on plastic this winter then!

If your new to mountaineering, I WOULD NOT be attempting to climb this peak this time of year.

Yep, don't want to get ourselves into anything beyond our abilities. Forecast isn't looking so good, so we called the trip off. Heading up to Squamish instead.

Good call. NOAA showing up to five feet of snow falling on Baker in the next few days, and temperatures in the low teens.

Probably a smart move to cancell. I don't have a ton of mountaineering experience myself. I tried Baker last year around this time via the Easton and a major safety concern we ran into was that there was just enough new snow to cover the smaller gaps and corners of the crevasses, but not enough to be stable at any time of day. We made it approximately 300 yards up the glacier and turned around. There was just no safe way to do it.