The Great White Watcher - Part 4
By Ken Wilcox © Copyright 2023
In the wee hours, we were summoned from our tents to begin the ritual of shivering away the cold, lacing up frozen boots, boiling water for hot drinks, and slamming it down with or without breakfast. Our camp was a bit chaotic, but jovial as we geared up for the big day ahead. With headlamps flashing every which way, we strapped on gaitors and crampons and began the long, upward slog.
The light of early dawn was soon with us as we lumbered up the crusty glacier, crunch upon crunch, watching like hawks for signs of hidden crevasses. As the morning warmed and the snow softened, we probed with our ice axes for thin snow bridges that might hide the dangers below.
After a few rest breaks and seemingly endless bootsteps trudging upward on steep snow, we reached the welcome saddle between the Black Buttes and the final slope to the summit. With one last break to snack and re-hydrate, the crowd of climbers mushed on, taking turns kicking steps, which made the going, though steep, not so difficult.
We could look down now on the Easton and Deming Glaciers, a continuous mass of ice as sprawling as the one we had just ascended. Looking down and across the so-called Roman Wall we could see the steam plumes rising from Sherman Crater. Far below was the Railroad Grade moraine and my high point from the previous summer. To the southwest, a unique string of reddish mountains known as the Twin Sisters Range rose like a formidable barrier to the Salish Sea.
We crested the summit plateau and found it surprisingly wide, almost a quarter of a mile across. At the far end was a small round bump, the true summit. Minutes later, in late May 1980—the same month that Mount Saint Helens blew her top—I quietly stomped my feet for joy atop Washington’s third highest volcano. A few weeks later and the class now completed, I joined another team of climbers to the top of Dakobed.
Back home, when I read up on the story of the Great White Watcher, I learned that it’s the iciest volcano in the contiguous U.S. Mount Rainier, because it is so large, has more ice by volume clung to its sides, but a much larger percentage of Mount Baker’s surface area is buried in ice. More ice clings to the mountain than all the other Washington volcanoes combined—notwithstanding Rainier, of course. It’s enough ice to fill more than a million of those ethereal dump trucks.
That fall, I moved to Bellingham to attend Western Washington University, where I happened to notice a flyer about a local campaign to create a new wilderness area around Mount Baker. I went to the meetings and was soon drafted, unwittingly, as the group’s co-chair, along with my new friend Howard. He really did most of the grunt work and knew how to schmooze with the right people.
I was also invited to join the board of the North Cascades Conservation Council, where I was lucky enough to rub shoulders with the greats of Pacific Northwest park and wilderness preservation--David Brower, Patrick Goldsworthy, the Dyers, Zaleskys, Mannings, Millers, and others. Thanks to an engaged crowd of supporters across Washington state and beyond, the Bellingham contingent could take a good share of the credit for successfully persuading Congress, in 1984, to establish the Mount Baker and Noisy-Diobsud Wilderness Areas.
Through the Mountaineers, I also found two new climbing buddies, Jack and Karen, who were in the same climbing class as I. We realized there were quite a few club members in the Bellingham and Mount Vernon areas of Northwest Washington. So we gathered over beers, held a couple of meetings, and ultimately collected the requisite fifty signatures needed to kick off a new branch of the Mountaineers in 1983.
Joined by other volunteers, we established a climbing program the following year, modeled on the coursework and field trips we’d experienced ourselves. I think everyone involved would agree that the Alpine Scrambles and Basic Climbing programs probably wouldn’t have happened, or at least not then, without Karen. The club remains active today, teaching people to enjoy climbing safely and responsibly. As a trip leader and instructor, or on my own with friends, I would go on to climb Mount Baker more than two dozen times, helping others to enjoy the same kind of experience I had when I first reached the summit.
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