West Coast - July 2009 - Andrew Lavigne's Website

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With the reunion now out of the way, we turned our attention to matters of recreation. We had seven days to work with before I was to head back to Ottawa, and we had one major centrepiece to our objectives: Mount Baker. Being clearly visible from downtown Vancouver, it was something that Jenn had always noticed, and now that she was more into mountains than she'd been when younger, she had voiced interest in climbing it. I myself had climbed Baker in 2002 with Markus and Peter Krug, but it was an interesting peak with many routes and I was more than happy to climb it again.

Start of the Grind

Now, Mt Baker is a large, heavily-glaciated Cascades Volcano. That means glacier travel. And my policy when travelling on big glaciers is to always go with a minimum of a three-person rope team. Fortunately, we had just the keener to join us: Brian (Connell), who'd also always wanted to climb Mt Baker, had caught wind of our ideas and was eager to join. Caroline also heard about the climb, and we invited her as well. A four-person rope team worked well for us.

View from Dam Mtn

Brian and Caroline weren't scheduled to arrive until the next day, however, leaving Jenn and I with a day to fill up. We used the time to head over to Mountain Equipment Co-op to stock up on various needed camp supplies (food and fuel, primarily), and then spent the rest of the afternoon doing a little training hiking on Grouse Mountain. For those of you who do not know, the 'Grouse Grind' is a famous steep trail-climb that heads up from North Vancouver to the resort buildings atop a shoulder of Grouse Mountain (Grouse Mountain is one of the many medium-sized mountains which form an east-west line north of the greater Vancouver region. We managed a sweaty ascent of the 'Grind, and even continued on beyond to a slightly higher peak set further back in the mountains, for a total of 10km of decent hiking. Good prep for the upcoming backpack up Baker.

Warning! You've only seen a two images and read a short writeup on our grouse grind climb. Click here to go to an "in-depth" page that contains a more complete account along with a bunch of pictures.

Mount Baker

We picked Brian and Caroline up from the airport the next day, immediately driving down into Washington State (Mt Baker is just south of the BC-Washington border). We went through the necessary logistics to get us to our trailhead the next morning (Monday), and off we went on our Baker adventure.

Click here to go to the "in-depth" page containing all of the pictures, elevation graphs, and an interactive track-and-photo map of our Baker climb attempt.

Ridge to Hidden Lake Peak

After our Baker climb, we wanted to do another outing - something easier, and something that could be done in a day. I picked a relatively straightforward and short hike up a scenic peak in the North Cascades called Hidden Lake Peak. This we did on the Thursday (July 30), and despite the somewhat oppressive heat and billions of flies, we thoroughly enjoyed the climb.

I had toyed with the idea of another short climb on the Friday (our last available day for activities, as Brian and Caroline were flying back east the next day), but we decided to nix the idea and instead do something a little more touristy and a little nerdier. We were near Everett, Washington when we decided this, so we decided to stay in a motel there for the night and go and visit Boeing's widebody airplane factory the next morning. Being somewhat of an airplane buff, this sounded pretty cool.

Click here to go to the "in-depth" page containing all of the pictures, elevation graphs, and an interactive track-and-photo map of the Hidden Lake Peak climb.

Bright and early the next morning, we headed towards the spot on the city map that said 'airport factory', eventually finding the visitor complex where we could park and get tickets for the museum and tour. The museum was not that large but was reasonably interesting, occupying our time until the start of the factory tour.

Future of Flight Center

Tour Entrance

The Trent 1000

The factory tour was definitely interesting, giving us a good look inside what Boeing claims is 'the largest open building space in the world'. It is definitely big, and it is hard to sense how big until you've spent a little time in it. Unfortunately, Boeing doesn't allow any sort of random tourist photography inside the factory, so I have no pictures. One of the highlights for me was the viewing of the very first 747-8. It had just completed final body join, and was very long, large, and impressive.

Dreamliner Fuselage

We had a very flamboyant tour guide who spoke in a interesting, highly stylized news anchor-type voice. He gave us a fairly thorough overview of Boeing's operations, but strangely, he failed to mention any of the major problems that have been hitting the building of Boeing's newest airliner, the mostly-composite 787 Dreamliner. According to him, everything seemed peachy keen!

After the tour, we headed up to the observation deck above the museum, where we got some views of a 747-400LCF (aka the 'Dreamlifter') -- a specially-modified 747-400 that can swallow whole sections of 787 fuselage for transport. Over on the flight line, we spotted the second 787 ever built, N787EX, sporting the livery of All Nippon Airways, one of the launch customers for the 787. Hopefully this latest issue with the wingbox stringers gets fixed soon, so we can see these birds in the air!

PW 4098 display

Second 787 Ever

A Dreamlifter

It was still before noon by the time we finished with our factory tour, so we slowed the pace down and lazily drove through the outskirts of Everett, hugging the coastline of Puget Sound and looking for a nice nautical-like place to have lunch. We succeeded admirably, finding a dockside restaurant (Anthony's Homeport) next to a massive marina in Everett. Under another beautiful blue sky, we enjoyed a seafood-filled lunch.

On deck for Lunch

It being still early in the day, we took our time, heading lazily up towards Vancouver, taking the scenic coastal route through Bellingham along the way. We crossed back over into Canada and arrived at our hotel in Richmond, where we checked in and then headed out to a favorite dinner spot of ours - Richmond Sushi -- continuing the seafood theme.

Brian and Caroline flew out early the next morning, leaving Jenn and I with another day together in Vancouver. We spent it doing some more wandering around, mostly in the Stanley Park area. We attempted to visit the aquarium (too long of a line), saw the totem poles, and saw a bit of a game of cricket being played. Nice place!