Lake Ann (Mount Baker Highway) — Saturday, Sep. 13, 2025

My friend and I planned to have an adventurous trip to the Mt Baker today. We started at midnight today from Seattle and reached the Artist Point at 3 am.
Then we took a nap in the car till 5:30 am.
I don't know about my friend, but I barely slept, I was looking at the giant snow covered mountain glowing in the dark the entire time.
The Artist Point parking lot had a decent amount of cars overnight,
It was not a clear night, mostly cloudy. Temperature was in 50s.

At around 4 am, a dense fog came from nowhere and covered the entire parking lot. I was watching this all the time without getting a sleep lol.
Some new cars started arriving at the parking lot at 5am and I saw some started their hike in the dark.

At around 6am, It was freezing up there and we got to see one of the most beautiful Cloud inversions around the Mt Shuksan.

after seeing the sunrise we drove to the Lake Ann trailhead at around 6:45 am. The parking lot was 60% full, most cars were from overnight backpackers.

We started the hike at 7:50, and hiked the first section completely through the fog.
There were a lot of spiderwebs in the morning, what's interesting is that some of the spiderwebs were so perfect, that it looked fake.

We first got sights of the mountains after reaching the boulder field section. Baker was glowing in the first day of the light with a beautiful cloud / fog thing was going on below it.
we heard a lot of pikas in the boulder fields and the meadow.
after the final climb, we ended up at the Lake Ann, with the left route takes you to the climbing route of Shuksan.
Got a close look at the Lower Curtis Glacier, beautiful small waterfalls cascading from the Glacier snowfields.

Saw a Grouse too near a campsite.

Overall, The entire hike was just amazing. and bring a ziplock if you fency a berry shopping. 🫐

Now the not so amazing parts of the hike:

1. In this Baker Wilderness area, there is no pit toilet anywhere in this trail.
make sure you carry a wag bag with you.
I accidentally saw a human poop very close to the main trail nearby a campsite. Someone tried to bury it with a couple of rocks. 🙁

2. There are no Wag bags at the TH, even the register is almost full too.

3. We saw around 5-6 people hiking to the Lake in the morning, but while coming back we saw around 60-70 people heading to the Lake.
We are glad that we decided to drive in the middle of the night and sleep in the car. When we came back to TH at around 1 pm, there were cars parked on both sides of the road.