The Great White Watcher - Part 1
By Ken Wilcox © Copyright 2023
Way back in my mid-twenties, several friends and I hiked to the edge of a broad, broken glacier on the flanks of Mount Baker, a two-mile-high, snow-white volcano located thirty miles east of Bellingham, Washington. The natives called it Koma Kulshan, loosely translated as the “Great White Watcher.” It’s a fitting name. The mountain rises higher than any other mountain within a hundred miles, and is widely visible from Seattle to Vancouver, British Columbia. It was also quite visible to Lieutenant Joseph Baker in 1792, while he and his good friend Peter Puget surveyed the inland waters of the Salish Sea during George Vancouver’s Voyage of Discovery.
I lived near Arlington, Washington, at the time, forty miles to the south. I’d certainly noticed the conspicuous Watcher from afar, but never up close—until that memorable summer day four decades ago.
It would have been August. From the cars, we hiked through sparse forest to a slippery crossing of the meandering fingers of Rocky Creek and our first good view of the mountain. The icy mass rose more than 7,000 feet above us, and its broad, bulging, whiteness lured us on. A bit of tenuous boulder-hopping got us across the braided creek. The silt-laden streams flowed down a shallow canyon where it seemed all the gods of boulders and cobbles had emptied their dump trucks.
We followed the trail steeply upward into old-growth forest, before breaking out into the lower meadows where the more stunning views began. A fork led us to the narrow crest of a lateral moraine that swept upward on such a perfect curve, it looked as though it was built for a train. That appearance inspired the name ‘Railroad Grade’ for the crumbling spine of dirt and rock beneath out boots. Playful, furry marmots scampered among their dens near the top of the moraine. The hike had become a bit of a grind by now, but I’d been fortunate to have a day job that kept me in shape.
We chugged up the imaginary railway and watched the lowlands drop away into a blue haze. Broadening green meadows to our left swirled around ramparts and lapped over ridges. To our right, the eroded face of the moraine fell away dizzyingly steep to the headwaters of Rocky Creek and the visible snout of the Easton Glacier. Bellingham’s Charles Easton, I would later find, was a local promoter and co-founder of the Mount Baker Club in 1911. He campaigned for a new national park here and traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby for it. He might have succeeded, had the attention of Congress not been abruptly diverted at the outbreak of World War I.
We were soon more than a mile high and face-to-face with Koma Kulshan, its icy summit still rising another vertical mile above us. Great rock ramparts blocked the sky to the north. Their sheer, layered buttresses leaned toward the true summit as if to subtly point the way.
I hadn’t hiked so intimately near or on a volcano before, or a glacier that was so close you could toss stones into its bottomless blue crevasses. I had no idea such a place even existed, though we were just an hour’s drive from my quaint little cabin in the woods near Arlington.
The experience would change my life from that moment on.
In the weeks and months following that first life-altering trek to Mount Baker, more than four decades ago, I began to explore much more of the surrounding high country of the North Cascades. I could even begin to identify the more prominent peaks and imagine the lush meadows, tarns, and old forests at their feet.
Hidden deeper in the range was Kulshan’s sister volcano, Dakobed, the Great Parent, or Glacier Peak to the non-native world. Dakobed, too, was flanked with alpine glaciers on all sides. Like Kulshan, its distinct cone rose above a sea of lesser peaks, though being more remote, it was not as conspicuous from the Puget lowlands as Kulshan. Both peaks rose to more than 10,000 feet.
I could not have imagined it then, but a year later I would be climbing to each of their summits.
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