Mount Baker, Kulshan, the Glacier Above Everything

Thirty miles east of Bellingham, on a clear day, you can see it from anywhere in the city: a white cone rising above the foothills, perfect and enormous, the kind of peak that seems to belong in a different category from the hills around it. The Nooksack people, whose territory has always extended from the bay to the slopes of this mountain, call it Kweq' Smánit, white mountain, and also Kwelshán, a name referring specifically to the hunting slopes where families traveled in summer to gather berries, dry meat, and hunt deer, elk, mountain goat, bear, marmot, and grouse. The name the English chose, Mount Baker, was given by George Vancouver, who named it for his third lieutenant, Joseph Baker, who first spotted it from HMS Discovery on April thirtieth, seventeen ninety-two.

Mount Baker is a ten thousand seven hundred and eighty-one foot active volcano, the second-most thermally active crater in the Cascade Range after Mount Saint Helens. Its summit is covered by glaciers, the volume of snow and ice on Mount Baker exceeds that of all other Cascade volcanoes combined, except Mount Rainier. In nineteen ninety-nine, the Mount Baker Ski Area, nine miles from the summit, set the world record for snowfall in a single season: one thousand one hundred and forty inches.

Not feet. Inches. That is ninety-five feet of snow in a single winter.

The mountain has erupted before. Geologists estimate the current volcanic cone is somewhere between eighty thousand and one hundred and forty thousand years old. Steam vents on the summit have been active throughout recorded history.

In the eighteen seventies, the mountain emitted enough steam and ash to alarm settlers in the valley below, though no major eruption followed. The Nooksack word for the open hunting slopes, Kwelshán, became the alternative English name "Kulshan," which Bellingham locals still use to refer to the mountain with an affection that suggests it belongs to this city in some way the official cartography does not quite capture.