After the rocky (read rainy) spring we’d had so far, I was nervous that I wouldn’t get to ski anything good with my friend Cameron while we was in Washington. I lucked out at the beginning of the month on Helen’s with Alec, but the weather window was not looking certain heading into the weekend. Things cleared enough in the predictions for Sunday to allow us to say, “Let’s go for it,” so we went for it.

I was really excited to finally get some skiing in with Cam. We both grew up in southern Indiana, became friends at the local YMCA rock climbing wall, and got into climbing outdoors together in the Red River Gorge, where we shared a lot of experiences taking my first car (a 1994 Cadillac Coupe DeVille) down bumpy gravel roads in search of obscure dirty cracks to plug gear in. Heck, Cam and I even played bass and drums respectively in the highschool jazz band, forming what’s known as a “solid pocket.” He’d moved to Salt Lake since graduating college, and had taken essentially the same path as me - diving headfirst into “getting after it” and becoming an multi-sport outdoor enthusiast. I was stoked to spend a good amount of time with him, but also extremely curious to see who would tire out first.

We got a late, late start Saturday, which always makes me uncomfortable, because an adventure never feels like an adventure unless you’re waking up before the sun. We just needed to walk the road and set up a camp somewhere before the summit of Baker. A storm, with thunder, was supposed to roll in sometime in the evening, so we decided to look for a camp sheltered below treeline. We found a spot along the “railroad grade” ridge among some trees just as the storm was licking at our heels.

We set up camp in a hurry, staking down the tent with ski poles and ice axes, and prepared for the storm that never came. While it looked like the storm was going to engulf us any moment, it missed us by less than a mile, and rained on the ridge across from our campsite instead.

If I felt uncomfortable with the late start, I felt even more out of my element in a completed campsite at 4pm. We spent our heap of extra time setting up a glamorous camp, digging ourselves some armchairs out of the snow, and cooking two separate dinners (each). We tossed a couple scouting laps up the hill behind our camp, enjoying some good evening corn before settling in for the night.

We woke up at a modest 4am and started moving. We were all packed, so all we needed to do was drink some coffee, pull our axes and poles from the tent, then get moving. It’s always funny how you convince yourself every cold morning that you won’t sweat through your layers - it’s colder than that. Yet somehow I’m always stripping a layer within a few minutes. We skinned through the main campsites of sleeping climbers, and slid down from the ridge to find ourselves on the Easton Glacier.

We kept an easy pace most of the morning, pausing on a steep icy slope to throw on ski crampons momentarily. A passing climber who was part of a ten person guided rope team said, “Glad I’m not you right now!” as I was paused putting my ski pons on. I laughed. What an odd thing for someone who didn’t have skis to say. We roped up for a majority of the glacier, although it was not necessary at all, due to the late spring and peak snowpack we were experiencing. Still, we practiced all proper techniques even if for nothing more than the practice.

We eventually made our way to the crater rim and only took a small break, because the sulphur fumes rolling out of the crater make us both sick to our stomachs. The crater rim sits just before the Roman Wall, a notoriously steep section of Baker that probably sits at a sustained 40°-45° and makes up the upper headwall of the route just before the summit. It was a strange feeling to be so excited and relaxed to climb/ski it, because my first season skiing I had bailed on this route twice. I didn’t make it to the Roman wall on both attempts, but I had serious doubts of my ability to ski it at the time regardless. Because of this, it held this status in my mind that made it a bit larger than life, which made it all the more satisfying to fly (almost) effortlessly up it with a good friend.

I arrived to the gentle summit ridge a bit behind Cam, cursing people from SLC for their free lung capacity training they get from simply existing. Luckily, Cam and I were both nearing the end of our energy, ut for opposite reasons. My legs felt fine, but I couldn’t breathe. Cam could breathe fine, but his legs were killing him. We stumbled our way to the summit block, and sat atop it with our skis, eating sandwiches and drinking tons of liquid before the way down.

In a funny after-the-fact realization, some friends I knew, Ari and Kyle, had essentially walked the entire route with us and were sitting on the summit block as we clicked into our skis and skied off. In my defense, they were decked out in sun protection, so they looked quite a bit different than the last time I had seen them on a rainy day in Snoqualmie. They told me later that they realized who I was just after we pushed off to ski down the summit block.

We skied up to the top of the Roman Wall and weren’t loving the quality of the snow under our feet. It was pretty firm and icy, so we plopped down at the top of the wall and sat with a few canadians also waiting for the snow to soften. It was cool talking to the canadians about Baker, because I had never realized that most people around the greater Vancouver area can see the mountain on clear days like us Seattleites can see Rainier. The giant stratovolcanoes essentially stop with Baker, so this group of guys were in the US skiing the biggest mountain they see from their homes. Pretty cool perspective as we sat looking at Glacier Peak and the surrounding North Cascades.

After about 15 minutes, we got impatient and skied the Roman Wall. It was firm and icy, but still really fun skiing. I get why it has the reputation it does, but even it these conditions I felt comfortable whooping my way down the fall line. We crossed back under the crater and skied until we finally made our way into corn, which quickly turned into sloppy corn. We skied fast, enjoying every turn we had earned on the way up. We got back to camp, tore down quickly, and skied off the railroad ridge. It was around 2pm and things were loose and wet. I ski cut our way off the ridge and kicked off a few sizeable slides.

We eventually made it to flat ground in the forest below and switched back to skins for convienience. This is where I had the great pleasure of watching Cam, who is inexperienced with the traditional cascadian activity of road skinning, bonk pretty hard. We made our way back to where we had ditched our shoes and returned to walking with our skis on our packs for the remaining mile or so. Don’t get me wrong, I was worked too, but I walked with a smile on my face knowing that even though the cascades don’t prepare you for high elevation breathing, they definitely prepare you for type 2 suck.