The weather in October, 1980 was much like we’ve experienced on the Northwest Coast this year, with stable high-pressure systems, blue skies and clear, cold nights. On a perfect day, thirty years ago, I topped off a busy year of climbing on the heights of Washington’s Mount Baker.
In 1976, retired photographer and mountaineer Charles Wishart sent me a post-card from Bellingham, Washington, to my apartment in nearby White Rock. The card featured 3,285 metre (10,778 ft) Mount Baker. On the back, he’d written two words: “North Face.” Though I was a hiker, I had no idea that I’d climb the ice-clad peak, via the straightforward Coleman Glacier route, just two years later.
I also could not have foreseen that, by the end of ‘77, I’d be thrust back into bachelorhood, bounce from the Kootenays, to Vancouver, the Fraser Valley and, by late 1979, end up back in White Rock. There, through an ad in a laundromat, I met world class rock climber Bryan Beard.
Beard was a restless adventurer. Born in New Brunswick, his formative years were spent in England, his father’s home. Leaving that troubled relationship at 15, with £50 in his pocket, he hitch-hiked to India. That odyssey–culminating in near-disaster—was typical of Beard’s search for meaning and spiritual transcendence. Musician, carpenter, luthier, boat builder, large-format photographer—he approached every craft with reverence and an eye for detail. But it was in the mountains he came closest to grace. To watch him climb was to witness poetry in motion.
During the winter of ‘79/’80, we froze our fingers on Squamish granite, nearly perished on frozen Shannon Falls, camped in caves with hungry rats, and sat in cafés solving the world’s problems over countless cups of tea.
The season of 1980 was perhaps my most active, with ascents in the Rockies, Purcells, Coast Mountains and the Cheam Range. On a sunny September weekend, I guided my brother and father to the summit of Golden Ears.
Good weather held into late October. Beard and I raced up the Glacier Creek trail, passing the Kulshan Cabin, to set up camp underneath the Black Buttes—a ridge of crumbling pumice—where we sipped a hot brew, bathed in the red sunset.
Before sunrise, in cheek-biting cold, we crossed the Coleman Glacier, through the ghostly shapes of icy seracs. This late in the year, crevasses were bare of snow—relatively safe, but a route-finding maze.
Contouring northeast, around the rocky Roman Nose, we began the ascent of the Coleman Headwall—the steepest and most difficult route on the mountain, with sustained 45-50 degree snow and shorter sections of 60-80 degree alpine ice.
We charged up endless pitches of steep “styrofoam” nevé, using the occasional belay protected with large aluminum snow anchors shaped like arrows. We leapfrogged up a great, shadowed couloir. To the west, beyond the dark buttress falling away to our right, we could see out to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the San Juan Islands, floating on the horizon. As the face steepened, we met a substantial barrier: a bergshrund topped with an overhanging lip. I set up an ice-screw belay, just inside the mouth of the frozen cave, and made my way up while Beard slowly fed out the lifeline between us. The sound of my axe and hammer, crampons crunching, echoed from the western wall of the bounding cliff.
I stepped onto the 500-metre upper face. Now we were on hard, blue ice. I sunk a solid screw and kicked upward, watching tails of white cloud tearing eastward across the indigo sky.
Minutes later, I experienced first-hand the power behind them: a jetstream travelling at 80 km/h. Each time I disengaged my right-hand ice tool, the wind peeled me back from the face like a barn door, cutting through the loose weave of my pile jacket like a knife. Installing belay stations on the exposed face was exhausting work. I fought my way carefully upward—kick by kick, swing by swing—until I could stand upright on the summit plateau and belay Bryan up.
We struggled to help each other into shell jackets, as the gale tried to tear them from our grasp. Still, we voted to cross the wide, wind-raked plateau to gain the slightly higher elevation of the true summit.
That day was probably as high as I’ve ever been—fit, happy, confidant and partnered with a well-matched confrère. Laughing, we shouldered our packs and leaned our bodies into the buffeting wind.
Brothers in arms.
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