Mount Baker

Mount Baker (; ), also known as Koma Kulshan or simply Kulshan, is a active glacier-covered andesitic stratovolcano in the Cascade Volcanic Arc and the North Cascades of Washington State in the United States. Mount Baker has the second-most thermally active crater in the Cascade Range after Mount St. Helens. About due east of the city of Bellingham, Whatcom County, Mount Baker is the youngest volcano in the Mount Baker volcanic field. While volcanism has persisted here for some 1.5 million years, the current volcanic cone is likely no more than 140,000 years old, and possibly no older than 80–90,000 years. Older volcanic edifices have mostly eroded away due to glaciation.

After Mount Rainier, Mount Baker has the heaviest glacier cover of the Cascade Range volcanoes; the volume of snow and ice on Mount Baker, is greater than that of all the other Cascades volcanoes (except Rainier) combined. It is also one of the snowiest places in the world; in 1999, Mount Baker Ski Area, located to the northeast, set the world record for recorded snowfall in a single season—.

Mount Baker is the third-highest mountain in Washington and the fifth-highest in the Cascade Range, if Little Tahoma Peak, a subpeak of Mount Rainier, and Shastina, a subpeak of Mount Shasta, are not counted. Located in the Mount Baker Wilderness, it is visible from much of Greater Victoria, Nanaimo, and Greater Vancouver in British Columbia, and to the south, from Seattle (and on clear days Tacoma) in Washington.

Indigenous peoples have known the mountain for thousands of years, but the first written record of the mountain is from Spanish explorer Gonzalo Lopez de Haro, who mapped it in 1790 as '. The explorer George Vancouver later named the mountain for 3rd Lieutenant Joseph Baker of HMS ''Discovery'', who saw it on April 30, 1792.

Name and etymology

Mount Baker is known to the several Indigenous peoples surrounding the mountain by different names.

The Nooksack, who live in the closest proximity to the north face of the mountain, have multiple names for different areas of the mountain. The name , meaning "white mountain," refers to Mount Baker as a whole, and specifically, to the glacier-covered summit above 7,000 feet. The open slopes of Mt. Baker, between about 5,000 feet and 7,000 feet, are known as , meaning "shooting place," referring to the act of going hunting up on the slopes. The third main name for the mountain is , meaning "many meadows," refers to the sheltered meadows below around 5,500 feet.

The Upper Skagit peoples, who live in the closest proximity to the south face of the mountain along the Skagit River watershed, call the mountain in Lushootseed, which means "permanently snow-covered mountain."

Other Indigenous peoples, such as the Lummi or Halkomelem-speaking peoples, use names for the mountain borrowed from the Nooksack term, as, due to the distance to the mountain from the core homelands of those peoples, only those closely related to the Nooksack might travel to hunt and gather with them at . Thus, the names for Mount Baker in Lummi and Halkomelem are ' and respectively. The name in the nearby Thompson language, , may be a loan from Nooksack or Halkomelem.

In the language of the unidentified "Koma tribe," the name is ''Tukullum'' or ''Nahcullum.''

The first Europeans to see and name the mountain were the Spanish. Gonzalo Lopez de Haro was the first European to record the mountain, calling it ', meaning "Great Mount Carmel".

The current English name for the mountain, Mount Baker, was chosen by George Vancouver. Vancouver named the mountain for 3rd Lieutenant Joseph Baker of HMS ''Discovery'', who saw it on April 30, 1792.

Mount Baker is sometimes also known by the alternative English name "Kulshan" which is the Anglicized form of the Nooksack name . The other related name, "Koma Kulshan," is likely the Anglicized version of the Nooksack phrase, , meaning "go up into the mountains to ."

History

Prior to European colonization, the Nooksack and Upper Skagit peoples hunted and gathered on the north and south faces of the mountain.

For the Nooksack, Mount Baker is extremely important in traditional religious beliefs, and was historically a great source of wealth (in the form of mountain goat wool, a highly prized commodity) and food. Nooksack families would travel via the North Fork () or Middle Fork () of the Nooksack River to the alpine meadows where they would set up temporary summer camps to dry picked berries and meat. From those camps, people would disperse across the mountain to pick berries or hunt. The high slopes of the mountain were prime territory for hunting deer, elk, mountain goat, bear, marmot, and grouse. Nooksack families held almost exclusive usage rights to the northwestern areas of the mountain, while the usage rights to the southeastern half were held by Skagit families. Certain families of tribes such as the Lummi or Halkomelem-speaking peoples could travel to the mountain if they were intermarried and closely allied with Nooksack families. This meant that some groups which had more hostile relations with the Nooksack, such as the Thompson, were generally barred from the mountain.

In 1790, Manuel Quimper of the Spanish Navy set sail from Nootka, a temporary settlement on Vancouver Island, with orders to explore the newly discovered Strait of Juan de Fuca. Accompanying Quimper was first-pilot Gonzalo Lopez de Haro, who drew detailed charts during the six-week expedition. Although Quimper's journal of the voyage does not refer to the mountain, one of Haro's manuscript charts includes a sketch of Mount Baker. The Spanish named the snowy volcano ', as it reminded them of the white-clad monks of the Carmelite Monastery.

The British explorer George Vancouver left England a year later. His mission was to survey the northwest coast of North America. Vancouver and his crew reached the Pacific Northwest coast in 1792. While anchored in Dungeness Bay on the south shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Joseph Baker made an observation of Mount Baker, which Vancouver recorded in his journal:
Six years later, the official narrative of this voyage was published, including the first printed reference to the mountain. By the mid-1850s, Mount Baker was a well-known feature on the horizon to the explorers and fur traders who traveled in the Puget Sound region. Isaac I. Stevens, the first governor of Washington Territory, wrote about Mount Baker in 1853:

Climbing history

First European ascent

Edmund Thomas Coleman, an Englishman who resided in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada and a veteran of the Alps, made the first attempt to ascend the mountain in 1866. He chose a route via the Skagit River, but was forced to turn back when local Native Americans refused him passage.

Later that same year, Coleman recruited Whatcom County settlers Edward Eldridge, John Bennett, and John Tennant to aid him in his second attempt to scale the mountain. After approaching via the North Fork of the Nooksack River, the party navigated through what is now known as Coleman Glacier and ascended to within several hundred feet of the summit before turning back in the face of an "overhanging cornice of ice" and threatening weather. Coleman later returned to the mountain after two years. At 4:00 pm on August 17, 1868, Coleman, Eldridge, Tennant and two new companions (David Ogilvy and Thomas Stratton) scaled the summit via the Middle Fork Nooksack River, Marmot Ridge, Coleman Glacier, and the north margin of the Roman Wall.

Notable ascents

* 1948 ''North Ridge'' (AD, AI 2–3, 3700 feet) Fred Beckey, Ralph and Dick Widrig (August 1948)

Geology

The present-day cone of Mount Baker is relatively young, perhaps less than 100,000 years old. The volcano sits atop a similar older volcanic cone called Black Buttes, which was active between 500,000 and 300,000 years ago.

Much of Mount Baker's earlier geological record eroded away during the last ice age (which culminated 15,000–20,000 years ago), by thick ice sheets that filled the valleys and surrounded the volcano. In the last 14,000 years, the area around the mountain has been largely ice-free, but the mountain itself remains heavily covered with snow and ice.

Isolated ridges of lava and hydrothermally altered rock, especially in the area of Sherman Crater, are exposed between glaciers on the upper flanks of the volcano; the lower flanks are steep and heavily vegetated. Volcanic rocks of Mount Baker and Black Buttes rest on a foundation of non-volcanic rocks.

Deposits recording the last 14,000 years at Mount Baker indicate that Mount Baker has not had highly explosive eruptions like those of other volcanoes in the Cascade Volcanic Arc, such as Mount St. Helens, Glacier Peak, or the Mount Meager massif, nor has it erupted frequently. During this period, four episodes of magmatic eruptive activity have been recently recognized.

Magmatic eruptions have produced tephra, pyroclastic flows, and lava flows from summit vents and the Schriebers Meadow Cone. The most destructive and most frequent events at Mount Baker have been lahars or debris flows and debris avalanches. Many, if not most, of these were not related to magmatic eruptions, but may have been induced by magma intrusion, steam eruptions, earthquakes, gravitational instability, or possibly even heavy rainfall.

Eruptive history

Early history

Research beginning in the late 1990s shows that Mount Baker is the youngest of several volcanic centers in the area and one of the youngest volcanoes in the Cascade Range. The Pliocene

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