Mount Baker/Boulder Glacier

The successful climb happened on 6/13-6/14. Strong group: 5 experienced people and 4 students doing a great job for their first climb on a pretty challenging climbing route.

Day 1:

Met at Sedro Wooley RS at 8:00 AM for voluntary climber registration.
Departed from TH at 10:15 AM (no pit toilet at this TH)
Trail was very muddy in places with some minor brushes and luckily the bugs or not bad at all. Everyone scrambled the rock buttress to gain the Boulder Ridge (some of us using the existing hand line). No harnesses used. In about 5 1/2h we made it to 6800' camp, at the base of the rocky cleaver. Camped on snow with no running water. Melted water, had a nice dinner, prepared the ropes for the actual climb day and went to bed by 8 PM. Gorgeous, perfect day!

Day 2:

Woke up at 1:00 am, surprised by beautiful clear skies and good visibility. While we were getting roped up we noticed some interesting lighting in the distance, our first thought being that those are the Bellingham lights however after further consideration we realized that we were witnessing actually the beautiful Aurora Borealis. Lucky us! Left camp around 2:20 PM, in very good visibility. The first couple thousand feet are straightforward up the right side of the cleaver on firm snow, no crevasses. There were some crevasses to navigate and some tricky climbing of a bergschrund ledge that was opening up about ¾ of the way up. Across an area with recent rockfall and avalanche activity. The final 1000ft took some navigation around some crevasses but was relatively straightforward.
We made it on the windy summit around 8:00 am. Placed pickets in various steep sections on descent where there were large crevasses below our descent path. We were back at camp by 12:15 PM and it took the whole group about 1 h 15 min to pack up. It was a longer than expected hike out, the bottleneck being 9 people rappelling with 4 new students to descend class 4 buttress getting off Boulder Ridge. Camp to TH about 5 1/2h .