Introduction
Being from the flatlands of Oklahoma is pretty bleak in the middle of summer. With temperatures near or over the 100 mark for almost everyday since late June, an escape was needed. I (Aaron Dyer) had been wanting to get back to the Cascades for a while and was able to convince a friend of mine to come along with me after we scored a set of free plane tickets. Ryan Wood had never been to the Cascades, having climbed mostly on rock in Oklahoma and mountains in Colorado. He had just returned from a successful outing on the Owen-Spalding, so he was feeling pretty confident in his mountain skills. I acquired volumes one and two of Nelson's Cascade books and it didn't take long to convince Ryan that Washington was the place to be.
Deciding what to do proved too difficult to narrow down. It seemed like we had every other item bookmarked in the guidebooks, but we had definately decided to do Mt Baker first and Mt Rainier last since Ryan had never been on a glacier. What remained for the rest of our 15 day trip we left up to the weather and our feelings once in Washington.
Mt Baker
After arriving in Seattle, supplying ourselves at the REI and heading to the Mt Baker trailhead where we spent our first night, we headed up the trail towards the Coleman Glacier with the intent of climbing the headwall. Our approach was filled with optimism as every view the mountain presented us showed the headwall in good form. We hike through the moraine, passing two or three tents along the way and set up camp on the Coleman Glacier out of the way of serac fall.
We left our camp at 3:30am the next morning and began the traverse of the Coleman Glacier over to the headwall. We made good progress until some very large crevasses presented themselves. Neogotiating our way around them put us on the wrong side of a rock butress and ice cliff from the headwall around sunrise, and we opted to change routes and proceed up the normal Coleman-Deming route. The rock ridge was long and annoying but not difficult. We found the Roman wall to be made up of fairly hard "snice" being as it was protected from the sun. As we topped out the Roman Wall we met one party coming down. We continued across the flattop to the barren summit cone to sit in the sun all alone on the top.
We descended in the hot sun, broke camp and returned to Bellingham with the intentions of resting the next day.
Forbidden Peak
We drove to Marblemount the next day just to see what was going on in the North Cascades for the next couple of days. On the way in we spotted Forbidden Peak, which had been on our wish list, and we couldn't resist its pull. We got permits for the next 2 nights and headed up towards Cascade Pass. Starting to hike towards the lower camp in the middle of the afternoon felt like hiking through a jungle. The trail was overgrown with numerous steep sections and downed trees. Then there were the flies. With at least 25 flies swarming each of us I couldn't help but feel like Pig Pen. I turned up my MP3 and tried not to notice. We arrived at the lower camp that evening, ate, drank and prepared to climb the West Ridge the next day.
We left camp around 5:30 in the morning and quickly made out way through the high camp where there were a couple other tents set up.
We proceeded up the moraine following the waterfalls through the cliffs because they presented essentially staircases for us to climb. We cramponed up on the glacier and made our way to the snow couliour entrance to the West Ridge. The warm weather had made this section not only steep, but with a couple narrow snow bridge sections as well as forming 2-3 foot wide gaps between the snow and the rock walls.
After dropping Ryan's camera and rapelling the 150 feet to get it, we found our way to the ridge proper. We waited for the party ahead of us to get some distance between us then we started up. The climbing was easy and fairly straight foward until the pitch with the fixed piton. I had the "luck" of getting this pitch, which we both found to be the crux of the climb.
Two more short roped sections and we were on the summit, later than what either one of us wanted to be, but we made it. As straight forward as out ascent had been, out decision to return down the ridge proved not to be so easy. After about 3 rappels down the ridge and onto the face away from our camp we began silmuclimbing the traverse back to the ridge proper and then down the ridge to the col where the gully began. We had been slowed down during our rappels by rope tangles and difficulty finding the middle of our marked rope (not marked well enough apparently). We had heard rumors of rappel stations to the climbers left of the snow gully, but not knowing where they were we decided to descend the gully, thinking we knew what we were getting into.
We rappelled into the gully where there were rappel stations, just on the rock walls, 2-3 feet away from the snow. I rappelled to the snow below our last rappel to examine if there were any lower rappel anchors we coudl use so we could gain access to some green slings I saw low along the rock wall. I found some and told Ryan where to rappel to. In the process of rappelling to the snow I had slipped between the rock and snow, causing my convertible pants and midweight top to get wet. With dark approaching, I was getting cold quickly.
Ryan made it down to the green slings to discover they were crumbly and attached to two old rusty pitons. Lacking any better option (without crampons, neither one of us wanted to down climb the snow bridge), Ryan began to resling the pitons, but was foiled intially by a rock stuck in the eye. Our headlamps were ideally located in our packs which we were in no position to take off at the moment. Ryan eventually reslung the pins and thre me the rope to lower down to him. He retrieved my lamp out of my pack and I rappelled down between the rock and snow ramp where I was able to downclimb to a place where I could attach my crampons and gain the glacier proper. Ryan followed, got out his lamp, packed away the rope and got onto the glacier as well.
We descended the glacier and waterfall cliffs in the dark, cutting our way across the terrain in the direction of the high camp knowing that we could find out trail to camp at the high camp. We found it eventually, but missed the trail coming out. We found it after cutting cross country and made it back to our tent at 2:30 am, 23 hours after starting.
Lessons from Forbidden
We should have had two ropes for the rappels even if we didn't take the second one up the route. We also should have considered descending the East Face Direct. Silmuclimbing on the way up would have saved us time and maybe bought us more daylight. Also, poor rope management due to laziness and apathy caused us more trouble than the time saved by not caring.
Mt Rainier
After putzing around for a day we headed over to Rainier. Some of the better lines (Libery Ridge, Ptarmigan Ridge) were not in good season, so we opted for the easy Emmons Direct since I had been up it before and it would avoid RMI. We left the car at 9:30am and hiked the highway-like trail to Glacier Basin, proceeded up the trail to the Inter Glacier, up the Inter and around Steamboat Prow to the Emmons Flats at 9630ft where we arrived around 3:30pm.
The trail looked pretty obvious from where we were, so we ate and made water and went to sleep at 6:00pm.
The alarm and moonlight wakes me up at midnight. The clouds that we saw coming in last night have settled about a thousand feet below us in a blanket of white. Above us the sky is clear and the barometer is constant. I wake Ryan and begin making our water for breakfast and the rest of the day. We leave our camp at 1:30am as a team of three is strolling up through our camp. They kindly let us in front of them. I have never felt so good ascending a mountain. With my MP3 on (but soft enough to hear Ryan), and a GU pack every hour, I hardly notice how much terrain I have led us through. The trail is pretty good, which benefits our speed because the snow was hard and spiked elsewhere. The crevasses we cross are moderate in size with bridges that will be solid until around noon. We seemed to be approaching the top but our altimeters put us 900 feet below it. Discouraged we continued up as the sun slowly climbed over the horizon and illuminated the clouds.
In fact the summit was right there. We topped out, cold from our exertion and the wind of the open summit. Hunkered by some rocks I have to double check my watch. 6:00am. We made it from our camp at 9630ft to 14410ft in 4.5 hours. Too cold to stay, we began our descent, passing the group of three on the way down about a thousand vertical feet from the summit. We assured them it was up there and continued down in the quickly warming sunlight. Back in camp by 9:00, we rest for about an hour and a half letting our socks and shirts dry before packing up camp and heading out. We made great time on the way out with the soft snow aiding our descent. A final glisade down the toe of the Inter Glacier and we were on terra firma. A short hike out and we were back at the car at 2:30pm, 29 hours after we started the day before.
Final Thoughts
We both love Washington, to anyone that lives up there, we hoped you know how lucky you are. Returning to Oklahoma has been a rough reentry with temperatures near the century mark and nothing with more than 500-1000 ft of relief on mostly broken low-angle granite. We will be back, hopefully to do some harder routes, and hopefully with the problems we had corrected. Until then, thank you Washinton for giving us all three summits we attempted and for allowing us the opportunity to return once again.
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