North Cascades

EARLY IMPRESSIONS: EURO-AMERICAN EXPLORATIONS AND SURVEYS

MARITIME EXPLORATIONS

Rising higher than 10,000 feet with a perpetual cover of snow and ice, Mount Baker is the most prominent physical feature in the proximity of North Cascades National Park. This peak became a familiar reference point for European and American maritime explorers long before the interior of the North Cascades was reached.

The Spanish were the first to record Mount Baker's existence although they, quite possibly, were not the first whites to see the mountain. In 1790, Ensign Manuel Quimper of the Spanish Navy set sail from Nootka, a temporary settlement on Vancouver Island, with orders to explore the newly discovered Strait of Juan de Fuca. Accompanying Quimper was first-pilot Gonzalo Lopez de Haro who drew detailed charts during the six-week expedition. Although Quimper's written journal of the voyage makes no reference to the mountain, one of Haro's manuscript charts includes a sketch of a prominent peak in the area of Mount Baker. [2]

One year later, in 1791, the renowned British explorer George Vancouver left England. His mission was to survey the northwest coast of America. After sailing around the Cape of Good Hope and wintering in the Hawaiian Islands, Vancouver and his crew reached the Pacific Northwest coast in 1792. While anchored in Dungeness Bay on the south shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, third lieutenant Joseph Baker made an observation which Vancouver recorded in his journal:

About this time a very high conspicuous craggy mountain . . . presented itself, towering above the clouds: as low down as they allowed it to be visible it was covered with snow; and south of it, was a long ridge of very rugged snowy mountains, much less elevated, which seemed to stretch to a considerable distance . . . the high distant land formed, as already observed, like detached islands, amongst which the lofty mountain, discovered in the afternoon by the third lieutenant, and in compliment to him called by me Mount Baker, rose a very conspicuous object . . . apparently at a very remote distance. [3]

Six years later the official narrative of this voyage was published, including the first printed reference to the mountain. [4]

By the mid-1850s, Mount Baker had become a well-known feature on the horizon to the various explorers and fur traders traveling in the Puget Sound region. Isaac I. Stevens, the first governor of Washington Territory, wrote about Mount Baker in 1853:

Mount Baker . . . is one of the loftiest and most conspicuous peaks of the northern Cascade range; it is nearly as high as Mount Rainier, and like that mountain, its snow-covered pyramid has the form of a sugar-loaf. It is visible from all the water and islands . . . [in Puget Sound] and from the whole southeastern part of the Gulf of Georgia, and likewise from the eastern division of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It is for this region a natural and important landmark. . . [5]