I don’t remember the first time I saw Mt Baker, but it was probably from the chairlift at Mt Seymour, a clear day in December, my first day snowboarding in BC after moving west at eighteen. The mountain was a hundred kilometres away on the horizon but felt as though I could reach out and touch it. Like I could reach out and grab a hold of the history of snowboarding, from Mount Baker Hardcore to the Legendary Banked Slalom to the Christy-Cummins to Wind Slab.
The first time I went to Mt Baker was eight years later, showing a visiting friend from the east coast around the beloved mountains south-west BC, and doing my absolute best to give him the impression that I knew my way around, doing my best to show him that I had gained some connection to the steep faces of the Coast and Cascade Mountains in my years spent riding the similar-but-never-quite-the-same-as-Baker chutes and cliff bands of Seymour and Whistler. Under Chair One we separated for a minute and he lost an edge and slid on his ass off a thirty-foot cliff, landing completely unharmed (physically) in ten feet of sluff pushed to the bottom by the day’s riders tiptoeing to the edge.
The second time I went to Mt Baker was a week later, having seen that friend off at the airport at 11pm the night before, now awake at 5am to drive for first chair, a half-empty weekday-morning parking lot, and thirty centimetres fresh. When I prepared to unload at the top of Chair Five the grumpy guy sitting next to me demanded angrily to know what was in my backpack, and when I told him the truth — three cliff bars, four whole carrots, and a probe and shovel — he smirked and grunted “very good” and told me to follow him.
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I read a book once that described Montana’s Glacier National Park and the surrounding mountains that Americans call the “Northern Rockies” as dark and foreboding. It said that life there was wholly dictated by a looming sunset that, “so far north,” sets before five o’clock. Immediately to the north of those Northern Rockies are B.C.’s Southern Rockies, the two of them separated by nothing, almost literally. Having worked a few months in the those mountains, the name “Southern Rockies” reminds me of baking summers, long limestone ridges, fields of wildflowers with grazing grizzly bears and soaring golden eagles, ecosystems unlike anywhere else in Canada. To get to the far end of the Flathead River valley (Americans call it “the upper Flathead” — to us it’s just the Flathead) it’s a three hour drive from Fernie on a poorly maintained logging road, ending in a rickety log cabin by the river with a view of the mountains, about as remote as you can feel in Southern B.C. But take a five minutes’ walk south of the cabin to where the trail peters out and in the distance there’s a gate and a building and a busy parking lot, where families with young children launch canoes.
Like those places, like a lot of places in these two countries, Mt Baker, Washington is only a few kilometres from the border. The mountain itself, Mt Baker Ski Area, and the Mt Baker Snowboard Shop are all closer to Vancouver and Mt Seymour than they are to Seattle or Snoqualmie Pass. If it wasn’t for striking differences in infrastructure, Baker would be as easy of a trip from Vancouver as Whistler is. It’s already been a much easier trip for residents of Vancouver’s eastern most suburbs. Or at least it was.
Most British Columbians know Vancouver as the centre of the “South Coast” or the “Lower Mainland,” though I’ve seen both the innocent and the guilty try to lump it in with the rest of the “Pacific Northwest,” a term that is a kind of anti-shibboleth, like To-ron-to or Cal-gary or Winterpeg, serving only to let everyone know you’re not from here. If the border one day ceased to exist for purely utopian reasons, Vancouver might be happy to call itself part of the PNW, becoming another location in the world of Twin Peaks, Raymond Carver, and Portlandia. If something more pressing, more terrible, something looming much closer, were to lump British Columbia in with Washington and Oregon, I imagine most Canadians would insist on calling it the same as they do now.
But though Vancouver is even darker than Portland or Seattle, there are still sunny winter days. As most people picture, there are weeks when the clouds hang between the buildings and the mountains just across Burrard Inlet are completely invisible. There are also many clear and sunny days when a line of clouds across the Fraser and Skagit River valleys obscures the mountains of the Cascades. And now, in the last 10 years, there are days when the sun shines horribly bright but everything else is hidden by the smoke. But then there are also days, almost every month of the year, when the sky is really and truly clear, when any view to the southeast is a view of the hulking giant that is Mt Baker. Days when the corner of your eye never stops catching a mountain that appears as half the horizon, half the earth, so large and so unmissable that it will never completely make sense why it can’t be all the time.
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Besides the occasional immigrant, I don’t think I would know any Americans if it wasn’t for snowboarding. Thanks to a series of events that seem in hindsight fully coincidental, I am connected with American snowboarders as distant acquaintances and as dearest friends. When I want to deconstruct a new video, tell a story of a trick or a tomahawk, or talk some shit about snowboarding, it is an American I contact first, that same friend who fell off the cliff at Baker.
For the last ten years, the only real reason I ever had to go to the states was based on snowboarding. Nine out of ten of my recent border crossings were on the way to Baker. But that friend is back living on the east coast now. In recent years we had talked about a trip, more than just dipping into the Nooksack valley and back: Wachusett, Loon, Stowe, Yawgoon where he grew up riding the rope tow just like I did at Spring Hill. Visits to the resorts that might not stand so tall but about which I had heard too many stories to ever overlook.
But the circumstances of our friendship are much different now than they were before tradition, action for action’s sake, disagreement as treason, the fear of difference, and contempt for the weak became the biggest questions in crossing that border. He still plans to come to Vancouver in the coming months, maybe again in the coming winters. And we’ll do our best to enjoy the city, to ride Mt Seymour fast and loose and laughing like we love to do. And I’ll do my best to make him feel at home. But we won’t be going to Baker. I won’t be going to New England. There will be no road trips to Mt Hood or La Push. I will not be buying a burner phone to evade Homeland Security or the Ministry of Truth. I will not be tempering my words or my thoughts. I will not capitulate and admit that the truth I have seen is false. I will not agree that a man who performed a Sieg Heil salute on camera did not, that a woman driving away from a group of men when she was shot dead was actually driving towards them, that a man with a knee on his neck shouting I Can’t Breathe was a violent threat. I will not agree that a country, home to many wonderful people, that has been manipulated by evil and slipped into a hatred and violence all-consuming, is the same as it ever was. And so, for the time being, I will not be crossing that border. That unseen cliff between us just looms too large. One little slip, one lost edge, one unexpected rush of slough, and we may be pushed over the border of some unforeseen drop, with no idea what lies in the landing.
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From the parking lot at Mt Baker Ski Area, Mt Shushkan is enormous on the left. The real Mt Baker lurks further in the distance to the right. But from the tailgate, or from the top of Chairs one, five, six, or eight, the two mountains seem side-by-side. Two siblings linked together by the resort and the snowboarders sitting between them. Two friends watching over each and every of the millions of lines ever ridden in that little valley by terrified or euphoric snowboarders, two sentinels that you can feel through the densest fog or the heaviest snowfall.
On a clear day I’ve seen Mt Baker everywhere from Frosty Mountain fifty miles east to the Sooke Mountains ninety miles west. On a sunny day in the spring at Mt Seymour, riding the Baked Salmon Banked Slalom, I’ve looked across the valley and felt all the years of the Legendary Banked Slalom reaching out from the past. Now I live in Victoria, BC, where the weather is even clearer than Vancouver, and find myself staring at the mountain more often than I could ever remember. Though Shushkan is a more imposing figure in the parking lot, from afar it is very much Baker’s junior, a blip in the distance separated from the enormity by a gulf. Now, to watch the two of them on the horizon, is to be confounded by the shifting distance of perspective. To be overwhelmed by all the distances I’ve ever travelled, all the giant, exhausting trips that are now only tiny lines on a map. To watch the sky turn pink over Mt Baker a hundred kilometres away while the sun sets at my back is to try, and to fail, to comprehend everything that stands between us.