Mount Baring — Sunday, Nov. 26, 2023

With the Barclay Lake trailhead recently reopened, I went up Mount Baring today to check out the route following the 2022 Bolt Creek fire.

The old climbers' trail has been completely obliterated by fire damage and blowdowns which makes the route even more challenging than it was before. In total, there was maybe 500ft of visible trail, and some of the flagging survived the fire. Prior experience with the route was helpful, otherwise I would recommend downloading a GPS track and leaving plenty of extra time for route-finding. It will be some time before the route gets enough traffic to put the trail back in.

There are two sections where the fire damage adds significant difficulty. The first is a particularly bad band of blowdowns around 500ft up from the trailhead. After this section the blowdowns are less frequent. The second is where the route leaves the ridge to the south slopes around 4200'. This area is completely burned, including the forest floor, leaving only loose rocks and burnt roots.

In the talus field, we ran into 1ft of snow which made the rock hopping challenging due to occasional postholing. Once in the gully, the additional snow made things easier, but conditions were variable with a mix of deep snow, postholing, and icy firm snow. An ice axe and crampons where mandatory. We brought snowshoes but did not use them. The snow wall at the top of the gully was easily bypassed to the left this time of year.

The trip took around 11 hours car-to-car with the first and last hour done by headlamp due to the short days this time of year.

See my full trip report on peakbagger here: https://www.peakbagger.com/climber/ascent.aspx?aid=2387643

Trip photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/1YJbsbQuiCACCJkJA

More Information on this Trip Report

• https://photos.app.goo.gl/1YJbsbQuiCACCJkJA