Kevin's Blog: Mt Shuksan Circumnavigation

So here's the video. Below the story. Pictures afterward. ... an awesome day and a half on Shuksan culminating in my second ascent of the gorgeous mountain.

So the original plan was to do a 3 day traverse (Fri – Sun) from the Baker lot to Shuksan summit to Nooksack headwall, over to icy peak via the nooksack glacier and out Ruth Mtn and Ruth Creek. Weather called for perfect Friday with a cold front pushing up from the S Friday night and displacing the high pressure system throughout Sat. It didn’t sound too severe with minimal precip so we decided to go for it. I had finally gotten up Shuksan last fall with Keith and Alison via the sulphide and I thought that if nothing else we’d do Shuksan again via a different route if we indeed had to bail. This was a trip that I decided to try some new things. 1) a new smaller, lighter pack. 2) a new “shelter” instead of a tent. 3) a more minimalist approach to try to shave even more weight out of the pack.

Thursday we packed up and left late. It was a long week for both Lucas and me. I had a grant to help write (which I didn’t completely finish, but spent my due time on), and Lucas was well, busy … I don’t know doing what, I never saw or talked to him.

Thursday came and we were finally off, dropping the take out car on the Hannagan Pass rd and parking just outside the lower Mt Baker lot at 11:30 for some minimal shuteye in the car By 4:00 AM we were on our way towards the White Salmon glacier. Lucas and I had skied nearly the whole white salmon last year so the route was familiar to us. However, this year there was less snow, the whole valley was filled with huge avy flows, making us reconsider our ideas. Undaunted, we trudged along. Going was slow because of the snow conditions/avy debris. We finally booted up past the worst part below the white salmon where we heard some huge seracs break off from Hanging glacier. We saw the rubble come out of the gully and it was like an unimpeded flow of rock and ice. It was pretty impressive and as I figured - the mountain’s was of demanding respect. We made some good time up the white salmon where we took a little break. Up Winnie’s slide, onto the upper curtis, up over and down to hell’s highway. Up hell’s highway to the sulphide. This all went swimmingly and we even got some turns in on the Upper Curtis glacier. By this time we noticed that we were following a solo climber that had likely taken this route the previous day laying boot tracks and skin tracks. We mostly followed this insanely aggressive line up Hell’s Highway finally switching to our own more reasonable line.

I was feeling surprisingly good at this point. Day was early, the summit pyramid in spitting distance and plenty of daylight. We skinned under the summit pyramid to what had to have been the windiest place between the sulphide and the Crystal glacier. For some reason we decided it would be a great place to set camp – there was a sittin’ rock. Mental note – windiest place on cold glacier bad. Got it. We rested and then decided to head for the summit to save some time to get into the nooksack cirque tomorrow. Skinned up to the class 3 gully and followed the boot pack to the summit. The weather was impeccable and the views were outrageous. A little bit of time and we were going to ski the gully, which was corn turn into mush. Unfortunately we were a few minutes late and the upper gully was shaded over making it corn turn into mush turn into crust. We skied most of it (I down climbed the narrowest section) and headed back to camp. As the sun went down, the winds came up. I was surprised that the shelter withstood the beating but we made it through the night and woke to a reasonable morning. We skied over the crystal to the nooksack headwall to assess the conditions, not knowing what to expect. The glacier was opening up and it looked doable. The issue was dropping in through the crevasses on steep terrain. While we finally found a line that was likely doable, I didn’t like the terrain with the “no fall zone.” Lucas didn’t like the weather. And the straw that broke the camels back was not being absolutely sure that we wouldn’t hit ice that needed downclimbing. Since we stupidly left the crampons on our living room floors, we decided that the best thing would be to save the traverse for a later date (year) and enjoy the area up around Shuksan.

We skinned back up the crystal taking various detours to check things out. We skied hanging glacier over to the upper Curtis where we finally made it back to our tracks from the previous day. By this time the clouds had engulfed Mt Baker and it started to look quite ominous. We decided to high tail it out of there and avoid an afternoon/evening of precipitation. It was a no brainer since we lacked any whiskey supplies to wait out the rain. On our decent we had the great idea to traverse over to the Shuksan arm and go out through the ski area. As Lucas wrote: …”we stupidly decided that it would be cool to do a high traverse over to the Shuksan Arm and ski along the top of the ridge, coming out at the top of the ski area. The non-fun aspects of this decision are shamefully too numerous for me to describe.” But hey, we avoided the avy debris below and the slog back up to the lot.

We made it back to the car for a stashed beer and chips before heading to seattle. On the way we were pummeled with rain, thankfully, being far away from the unknown cirque – but who knows it could have been sunny and majestic back there. We’ll find out next year!

View across the avy fields early in the AM.