For Whatcom County residents, Mount Baker – also known as Koma Kulshan –always looms large.
Its beautiful, snow-covered peak, some 10,781 feet above sea level, is the county’s highest point and the third-tallest summit in Washington State. And its ski area still holds the world record for the most snow recorded in a single season, when 95 feet of snow fell during the winter of 1998-99.
But Mt. Baker is also an active volcano. And five years before Washington’s Mt. Saint Helens erupted in 1980 and killed 57 people, it was Baker’s stirrings that caused a real stir among scientists and Whatcom County residents.
Mt. Baker’s Eruptive Past
Mt. Baker is thought to have formed during and after the last ice age, some 15,000 to 12,000 years ago, according to research from the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Around 6,000 years ago, a large eruptive sequence occurred, reshaping the mountain and surrounding area.
Historical accounts point to an 1843 volcanic explosion, which formed the current shape of Sherman Crater. Rock fragments allegedly fell like snow in places, with miles of forest seen ablaze. Indigenous accounts suggest great numbers of salmon perished from local rivers.
Scientists believe two lahars – or volcanic mudflows – occurred around this time period. One of them is thought to have flowed into a naturally occurring Baker Lake, raising the lake level at least ten feet. In 1891, another lahar occurred.
In the years after, steam emissions were occasionally seen rising from the volcano.
Mt. Baker’s Steam Stirrings
After several decades of minimal activity at Baker, things changed in 1975.
Significant displays of steam venting began the second week of March, prompting Don Easterbrook, then chair of Western Washington University’s geology department, to fly around the volcano. He observed six vents melting surrounding snow, but only one vent under the intense pressure required to shoot plumes of steam hundreds of feet above the crater.
Though the air smelled strongly of sulfur, Easterbrook told the Bellingham Herald he saw no ash or lava, and concluded eruption danger was minimal. Still, the front page of the newspaper the following Sunday led with an illustrated stick of dynamite sticking out the side of the mountain, with the headline “Is Mt. Baker about to blow its top?”
Soon after, the USGS announced plans to place seismic monitors and sampling devices on and around Baker, and closely analyzed the data.
Excursions to place such monitors didn’t always go smoothly: A team placing devices at the end of March had to descend the mountain on foot when whiteout conditions prevented a helicopter extraction. In early May, a two-man scientific team became stuck on Baker due to high winds, keeping them camped on the mountain an extra day.
By mid-April, scientists posited that Baker’s new activity was not volcanic but glacial, as multiple seismographs indicated only surface-level movement of the volcano. Still, steam spouted regularly, with dust and clay also blown from vents. Two such vents, scientists said, were new, and the first major thermal changes at Baker since the turn of the century.
Closures and Concerns Around Mt. Baker
After consulting with the USGS, the United States Forest Service began announcing closures on and around the mountain in mid-April.
Sherman Crater, Boulder Glacier and the Boulder Creek Campground were soon off-limits, due to mudslide and avalanche danger from increased thermal activity.
Baker’s rumblings even entered into arguments about a Skagit County-based nuclear power facility, planned near Sedro-Woolley. A mid-July 1975 hearing by the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board featured testimony from multiple geologists; most concluded that even worst-case Baker scenarios wouldn’t impact the plant, which was never built.
Despite no signs of eruptive activity, increased thermal activity was turning Sherman Crater into “an ice floe in a frying pan,” according to Dr. John C. Eichelberger, a Los Alamos geologist who visited Baker.
Vents were melting ice caps, opening up crevasses, and even forming a shallow lake in Sherman Crater. Visited in Mid-June by Dr. Stephen D. Malone, a University of Washington seismologist, the lake had a water temperature of 77 degrees, smelled like rotten eggs, and had an acidity level somewhere between apple and lemon juice.
By June’s end, the Forest Service closed public access to Baker Lake, including all shoreline and camping areas. All national forest lands between the Baker Lake Highway and Baker Lake were also closed. Puget Sound Power & Light Company also closed public access to Baker Lake Reservoir.
Closures were a response to USGS reports noting the danger of a mudslide. The odds of a slide occurring, it was stated, were roughly 1 in 100, based on the area’s past geologic history and human activity.
This didn’t sit well with residents of Concrete, a town heavily reliant on summer tourism. Robert Fader, then-publisher of the Concrete Herald, was quoted as saying the closures made outsiders “think we’re in the foothills of Pompeii.”
State Senator Lowell Peterson was also upset.
“Steam has been coming from that extinct crater all my lifetime and no one has panicked,” he said. “Because some so-called scientists have seen steam for the first time are we to be stampeded into a closure that will harm both the local economy and the tourists and visitors to our area?”
Mt. Baker’s Mystery
That July, Puget Sound Power temporarily kept Baker Lake Reservoir 30 feet lower than normal, in case it had to absorb a mudslide impact.
Meanwhile, the USGS’s Dr. Mark Meier told the Associated Press that Baker’s sulfurous fumes, ice runoff and heat emissions were sharply increasing. A June 30 gas reading showed 10,000 pounds of sulfur being emitted each hour – enough to make Baker the state’s second-largest sulfur polluter, behind only a Tacoma smelting and refining plant.
The fumes challenged scientists visiting the crater, even with gas masks. One person lost his vision for several hours, and another began vomiting after spending time there. A third person’s crampons eroded and broke off his boots while climbing.
If a slide happened, it could be huge: Meier said up to eight million dump truck loads of debris could cascade down the mountain and into Baker Lake, travelling roughly eight to nine miles from the volcano crater.
That summer, Baker’s eruptive possibility overshadowed its natural beauty, and even the Herald wasn’t immune to what we now call “clickbait” headlines.
In late July, an article teaser stated “Mt. Baker Ready to Blow,” only to have the actual article read more benignly. The author compared the volcano to a mother-in-law: acting up just enough to remind one she’s there, and being impossible to predict.
By August, there was no evidence of fresh magma moving inside Mt. Baker. Through the rest of 1975, scientists noted stable seismic readings, despite steam vents recording the hottest temperatures of any Cascade Range volcano through that point in the century.
At a regional conference for the American Geophysical Union that October, scientists expressed no consensus on Baker’s activity. Meier said the mountain was changing internally without expected exterior changes. There was increased heat and steam, but no seismic activity or peak shape changes typically presaging an eruption.
By the end of 1975, though, the damage was done in Concrete: September sales tax figures showed business down 18% from 1974.
Mt. Baker Quiets
In April 1976, the USGS announced that monitoring revealed no geologic warning signs associated with a future eruption. Baker had remained stable through the winter, and recreation areas reopened that spring.
An eruption was no more likely, said the USGS chief of geochemistry, than before increased steaming began. Groundwater leaking down a newly opened crack into Baker’s hot core, he speculated, might be producing the more voluminous steam. Thermal activity gradually declined in the following years, but stabilized above pre-1975 levels.
Additional decades of data led the USGS to suggest magma may have intruded beneath Baker that year, but lacked the energy to erupt. Instead, it likely formed a dike, heating the hydrothermal system above it and triggering surface activity.
Five years later, the awakening of Mt. St. Helens would produce a similar storyline: politics and public opinion about private and public lands, pushing back against geology and safety concerns.
That story – unlike Mt. Baker’s – ended with a bang.
