The scenery is also as beautiful as any high route I’ve done. On paper, it looked doable in a day, but I am glad we did not try that, because that would have not gone well. This was by far the most rugged high route I have ever done. 3 days in the rugged North Cascades can certainly do a number to the soul. In fact, Steve instead took a log crossing because he said the bridge was aid. The final walk across a broad bridge and gravel trail felt almost too civilized after that epic descent from Blum. We immediately went to wash off in the river. At the end, we just walked along Blum Creek until finally exploding onto the road/trail that they call the Baker River Trail. It was our friends from earlier! They were actually on the trail, so we found them and continued on. We completely lost the trail closer to the bottom, but heard voices. We somehow kept going down the wrong path and ending up in a wall of cliffs and brush. The flagging was never quite where it was needed, only where we didn’t need it. We’re quite good a sniffing out use trails, in fact, I might call use this my best skill in the mountains. Then we’d schwack one way until we found the real trail. We’d just follow the obvious path of use, until it slowly started to fade into a vertical jungle. However, as it steepened below 4000 ft, we started losing the trail. It felt like a lot like the Terror Basin Trail. We picked up an obvious climber’s trail around 4500 ft. The ridge descent started out pretty well. In retrospect, it was better than what we were about to begin. From the lower Blum Lakes, we traversed the hillside at about 5000 ft, occasionally finding signs of use but much. Getting down to the lower Blum Lakes involved navigating an absolutely terrible poop chute. At least, that way, you will never be making the wrong decision. But I do believe that, when in doubt, rope up. Everyone has their own risk tolerance and I don’t like putting hard never/always rules on decision making in the alpine, which is such a dynamic environment. Never take the decision to travel unrope on a glacier lightly. I’ve definitely become more aware of both the risks I take and how I portray the decisions I make to others. I think there’s this misconception that unroped glacial travel is a sign of experience or something to strive for. The nature of the problem is simply too unknowable and dynamic. Experience can help mitigate, but will never fully eliminate risk. But I always emphasize to people that with unroped glacial travel, there is always an element of risk and chance. In the field, we carefully discussed route choices to improve safety based on our knowledge of glaciers and this one in particular. As a group, we had a good discussion prior to the trip about this and came to a consensus. People often ask me, “how do you make the decision to bring a rope or not on a glacier?” There are specifics: season, weather, satellite imagery, risk tolerance, slope angle analysis. Red rock and glacier over on Canadian Bacon. There was a line of 20 or 30 people to use the bathroom, but almost no one on the actual trail. Tyler, Steve, Sam and I got a late start from Seattle, left a car at the end of Baker Lake, and arrived at the Watson Trailhead close to 11 am. Day 1: Watson Lakes Trailhead to Elementary Peak Maybe I can write a book about it with Steve House. While it has been inspiring to see so many elite athletes set crazy FKTs and whiz through the mountains, I’ve felt more inclined to lounge in a meadow, sip some Crystal Light, and watch the sun go down. It would continue the theme of this summer: slow and light. We knew it was a little late in the season to do the Watson Blum High Route, but figured we could give ourselves three days to deal with the extra post-glacial slowness. Labor Day 2020 provided with an unseasonably warm and dry three day forecast. I’ve been trying to balance making my own high routes with ticking off the classics, so it seemed finally time to go for this one. It is a well known high route, documented in the Beckey Guide, and one of the first high routes I ever knew about, before I had even jumped aboard the high route train. Watson, Bacon, Hagan, and Blum in the Baker Lake region of the North Cascades. The Watson Blum High Route connects the terrain between Mt.
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