Goat Mountain

1/20/08
Finally!!!! Ever since my very FIRST day snowboarding in Washington I’ve wanted this mountain!!! It’s just been calling to me from the Baker Ski Area every-time the skies cleared….. It took some convincing, good weather, and the avalanche danger to FINALLY drop below High, but Doug and I finally did it.We left Seattle around 5:30am for the drive, arriving at the TH at about 8am. Its too bad they don’t plow that road…or really “block” it off. It was almost too tempting to drive to the summer TH, but we didn’t. Instead we packed up, took a safety check and began skinning the road.

The snow started coming down pretty hard as soon as we reached the summer TH and seemed to get more intense as we climbed. The trail was super easy to follow almost all the way to tree line where we decided to find a safe spot and set up camp at about 5500′.

We had a great view toward the Baker Ski area.

After setting up camp, we headed up to make ourselves a little track to follow in the am….and to get some first day turns…..just as the sun began to set.

Early to bed! I mean, there really isn’t much else to do in camp, in the winter…..besides getting TONS of sleep. We took a leisurely morning and headed out of camp around 10am for the Goat summit. With fair weather and cold temps is was nice to keep moving.

Following the ridge above our camp was extremely scenic and made for a great skin approach. The clouds broke up a little and we were treated with a sunny shot of the SW face (our objective)

and the remainder of the approach ridge

Eventually the skinning took a turn to steep and difficult with a fairly firm crust underlying the new 6-8″ of fluff. Probably the steepest part of the whole face was the skin….

We reached the summit amazingly at our turn-around time of 1pm. Transitioned to downhill mode, picked out our line, and plowed on through. Each turn presented more and more POW and more and more face shots of super light & cold crystals. You really couldn’t ask for much better snow..or a nicer line!!!! Avy was still considerable so we stuck to skiers right of the face connecting islands of safety all the way down. (too bad my strap is in the way!!!)

We were able to cruise all the way to the lower bowl. I had to boot for about 20′ before getting myself back to rideable terrain…not bad for boarding!!! Floated the rest of the way back to camp where the sun started to really come out and the winds picked up.

Reading the avy report the following day made me realize how important timing truly is in the NW. The winds changed directions on Sunday and probably really loaded the SW slopes that we were on, bringin the avy back up into higher risk….

As always, any trip out is a good one regardless of conditions, but this one couldn’t have been much better!!

For you trip detail folks:

approach time to camp: 3.5 hrs from Nooksack River & SR 542

camp to summit: 3hrs

Snow conditions: 6-8″ of fresh, unconsolidated POW on top of earlier in week crust. Pretty firm crust (needed to stomp skin track in), with about 4 finger hardness underneath. No pits dug, just chose lower angle terrain. Winds changed from NE to SW (ish) mid-day,decent amount of snow transport near ridgelines. Windier as day went on.

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