• Finally, aber four days of learning how not ot kill ourselves we finally got to climb the biggest mountain in the Mt Baker area. Which is, rather unsurpising, Mt Baker.
• Climbing a Mountain over alpine terrain usually means to start early. There are various reasons for that, the most important is usually to prevent being on (or below) snow while it heats up at noon. To make it easier we had prepared everything: ropes for glacier travel, backpacks, food and so on. And with Alistairs special prep talk (I DO NOT want to stand around freezing while I have to wait for someone) we managed to start on time at 1am. Pretty suprising actually since up to now we had never managed to do anything in the planned time.

• You can guess the route on the next picture. In reality the way is longer than it looks.

• It took us about four hours to get to the steep bit, the so called “roman nose” and maybe another hour to the top.

The “roman nose” on the way down

• Afterwards we spent a lot of time going down, packing up our camp, going down again, driving back to bellingham and driving to “Washington Pass state park” our Campground for the night

glissading down Mt.Baker

• Day 6 was the first rock climbing day. But since this was a course it wasn't all fun and games. We learned to rappel, use a rappel extension, build anchors. Oh and we did some rock climbing.

• In the evening we had to do some reshuffling, we lost Alistair, Erin, Brigitte and Shivesh and won Ben, Andy (guides) and Barry. And we had to do some driving. Our new climbing area was the Mazama Valley.