Mt. Baker Ski Area focuses on values to draw snow lovers from around the globe

Life, Outdoors, Snow Sports Seattle

MT. BAKER SKI AREA, Whatcom County — Go east.

Set against George Washington’s silhouette on a Highway 542 road sign, this command adorns bumper stickers across Western Washington. The message describes the magnetic pull to the winding road through Whatcom County that dead-ends at Mt. Baker Ski Area, a local-favorite ski hill with a global draw.

Pass through farmland and forest then the sodden valley town of Glacier. Start climbing switchbacks on a two-lane mountain road. Glimpse North Cascades peaks obscured by towering pines. Round the final bend and keep your eyes on the road as glaciated, glorious Mount Shuksan appears — that’s if you get a break from the near-ubiquitous clouds.

Summer and fall hikers flock to Artist Point, snowbound until July, leaving a long season for winter worshippers who start their pilgrimage at the White Salmon or Heather Meadows base areas. Mt. Baker features on the cover of snow sports magazines, inspiring fierce devotion and an international following from hardcore skiers and snowboarders.

Yet look around and this outsized reputation doesn’t square against the small-mountain feel.

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With just 1,500 vertical feet spread across 1,000 acres, Mt. Baker is the most diminutive ski area in the Washington Cascades. There are three day lodges, but no overnight accommodations. Forget après-ski. The place clears out after lifts close at 3:30 p.m. Day tickets still cost less than $100 from a walk-up window. Prices don’t fluctuate based on demand and you can’t buy in advance. Tickets still hang from wickets on your jacket for manual inspection — no RFID cards or scanners in sight.

Nothing about Mt. Baker feels like skiing in the 21st century, an era of industry consolidation, multiresort passes and high-tech investments.

How has this place remained so stubbornly independent? The answer to this mom-and-pop riddle is “father and daughters”: longtime general manager Duncan Howat, 77; CEO Gwyn Howat, 56; and marketing director Amy Howat Trowbridge, 50.

Watch: A snowboard community built around the Legendary Banked Slalom

The Howat family works at the behest of a small group of local owners (the family also owns shares) who have been careful to stay debt-free. Duncan Howat began working at Mt. Baker in 1968 and has a simple guiding philosophy: “Employees first. Customers second. Shareholders third.”

That approach has kept Mt. Baker intentionally small even as the ski industry has gone big.

“It’s not a place for a one-off vacation,” Gwyn Howat said. “We intend for this place to be a part of people’s life in winter in the Pacific Northwest.”

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Snowboarder’s paradise

Mt. Baker’s world-class reputation shines brightest every year when some of the planet’s top snowboarders converge at the top of Chair 5 to compete in the Legendary Banked Slalom. The annual race, which held its 35th edition from Feb. 3-5, consists of a timed run through a gully marked with slalom gates. Like a natural halfpipe, each turn is banked. The course embraces the surflike flow of snowboarding, but running the 500-foot course in around 90 seconds sends G-forces surging as riders struggle to balance speed with control.

Tom Sims, one of the sport’s founders, organized the first banked slalom at Mt. Baker in 1985, cementing the mountain’s status as a place where snowboarding wasn’t just tolerated but embraced. That reputation rings true nearly 40 years later.

“It really is a snowboarder’s mountain,” said Khai Bhagwandin, 36, a Seattle-based acupuncturist sponsored by Niche snowboards who competed in her third banked slalom this month.

While the entry list has plenty of Pacific Northwest addresses, the Legendary Banked Slalom draws competitors from as far as Austria, Japan and Switzerland. Swedish snowboard cross athlete Pontus Stahlkloo, 49, set his sights on the race after retiring from the World Cup circuit. He won the pro masters division in 2020 and successfully defended his title this year. (The race was not held in 2021 and 2022 due to the pandemic.)

“All the pro riders want a duct tape trophy,” he said amidst a throng of nearly 400 snowboarders. They cheered as competitors launched from a wooden start shack emblazoned with the messages “Say Your Prayers” and “Be Low Stay Powerful” while volunteers in a vinyl Quonset hut served up heaping portions of seafood paella and cheese fondue to fuel the long race day.

Winners receive the coveted golden duct tape trophy — a version of which can be seen in the new snowboarding exhibit at the Washington State Ski and Snowboard Museum. The humble tape is an homage to the 1980s, when Gwyn Howat taped her sister Amy’s feet to her board in the days before reliable bindings. The snowboard-friendly culture at her home hill propelled Amy to world champion status as a teenager.

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By the mid-1990s, snowboarding had gone from fringe sport to mainstream, primed for an Olympic debut in 1998. The Howats decided to pull the cash purse and instead hired Puyallup tribal artist Shaun Peterson to design the event’s logo and make commemorative paddles and drums for the winners. To give the race a Northwest touch, winners still receive a Pendleton blanket alongside their duct tape trophy.

“We went for culture over cash,” Gwyn said.

The decision proved prescient. Snowboarding became a major global sport with its own World Cup and prominent billing in the Winter X Games. Athletes now yearn for the back-to-the-roots atmosphere that the Legendary Banked Slalom fosters. Instead of wearing a jersey plastered with corporate sponsors, riders duct tape their bib number to their legs. Only snowboard companies are allowed to garner advertising placement along the course — not that the banked slalom is televised.

“The Legendary Banked Slalom reminds me of snowboard competitions in the ‘90s,” said Pemberton, B.C., resident Seth Wescott, 46, a two-time Olympic gold medalist in snowboard cross (a grouped style of snowboard race), after he finished his first run.

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The presence of Olympians attests to another of the race’s unique attributes: Pros mingle with amateurs. This year’s youngest winners were 11 and 12 in the “next gen” division; they rubbed shoulders with retired pros and longtime Baker devotees from the era before name brands and sponsorships. Bellingham resident Kevin Boyce, 68, claimed to be the race’s oldest competitor as he handed out homemade CDs wearing a tie-dye snowsuit and Grateful Dead patch.

All thrills, no frills

The Legendary Banked Slalom is a microcosm of Mt. Baker itself: A low-key scene that belies a high-caliber event.

The ski area’s modest stats on paper don’t reflect the steep cliffs and chutes right under the chairlifts that make Mt. Baker a beacon for extreme riders. Short hikes out of the ski area boundary, meanwhile, lead to the tantalizing snow mounds known as Hemispheres and the daredevil spines on Shuksan Arm. (Despite the name, Mt. Baker Ski Area sits on the flanks of Mount Shuksan, though nearby volcanic Mount Baker is visible from the ski area’s summit.)

The ski area’s signage provides ample warning of the risks in these “extreme danger zones” — from avalanches to falls — but errs on the side of permissive.

“There’s not a lot of hand-holding,” said Gwyn. “We offer a huge amount of freedom and we’re not afraid to tell people this is a difficult place.” There are still learning areas and marked groomed runs that steer clear of danger zones.

This jaw-dropping terrain, though risky, is what draws the likes of Stahlkloo, who owns a season pass despite living 5,000 miles away. He planned to stick around for five weeks after the race. “Baker has this massive snow accumulation reputation in Europe,” he said, noting prominent billing in magazines like Snowboarder’s Journal, published out of Bellingham. That reputation owes much to the world record for most snowfall in a single season: a staggering 1,140 inches during the 1998-99 winter.

Baker’s infamous snowfall has also put the ski area unwittingly on the forefront of tree wells — deep pockets of loose snow near the base of evergreens — and the risks of snow immersion suffocation. Two fatalities of expert local snowboarders ahead of Presidents Day weekend 2003 led the Howats to shut down the ski area and draft emergency messaging that formed the genesis of today’s internationally recognized educational resource, deepsnowsafety.org.

Heavy precipitation is a fact of life in this wettest corner of the Cascades. It falls mostly as snow above 3,500 feet, the lowest point at Mt. Baker, and there’s currently well over 100 inches of snow on the ground — but the mountain also clocked 27 inches of rain between December and January.

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“I came here for the precipitation, both liquid and solid,” said competitor Shawna Paoli, 32, a sponsored snowboarder who moved to Glacier six years ago, fleeing forest fires in Montana. She clocks shifts at Glacier’s popular Wake ’n Bakery and spends summers commercial fishing to sustain her Baker-centric lifestyle.

Twenty miles down the road, Glacier (population 500 year-round) is the closest town to Mt. Baker. While mountain towns near ski areas across the West struggle with growth and development, the boom has largely bypassed Glacier.

“It’s touch-and-go whether there’s going to be a town,” said Drew Schwehr, who has owned the Wake ’n Bakery for four years and views the town’s few other businesses as standing on shaky footing. But he prefers the quiet quirks of rainy Glacier, which reminds him of stints in Park City, Utah; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; and Breckenridge, Colorado, before they became “Disneyland for millionaires.”

Life isn’t easy in Glacier. Schwehr estimates the power goes out 10 times per year, necessitating a generator and wood stove. He recalls a November 2018 storm that knocked down 112 trees across Highway 542, bringing residents out with chain saws. Those kinds of obstacles are likely to repel deep-pocketed development.

“The isolation is a blessing,” Schwehr said.

The Howats share that sentiment. The ski area — pointedly not a “resort” — is disconnected from the public utility grid. Generators power lodges and communications arrays while the ski area manages its own wastewater treatment. Diesel engines fire up the lifts. Some infrastructure is already in place, with more to come during each short offseason, to improve energy efficiency and shift the load to renewables. While a lean operation, the Howats make prudent investments, like the 10-year-old Cascadian-style Raven Hut Lodge.

With so many multiresort passes available that the savvy skier needs a spreadsheet to track them all, Gwyn has unflinchingly rejected every offer, with the exception of a three-day season pass exchange at kindred spirit Mt. Hood Meadows in Oregon. Despite not playing the industry’s new game, Mt. Baker consistently reaches its annual season pass sales quota, though having a captive market in Whatcom and Skagit counties helps.

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Mt. Baker stayed untouched by the staffing shortages that plagued Vail Resorts last season — vans rumble out of Bellingham every morning before sunrise hauling dedicated staff — and Gwyn claims the ski area has yet to suffer a parkout. (Three parking lot attendants disagreed and said they have turned away cars on peak days.)

And the growing backcountry scene accessing public lands beyond the ski area from the Heather Meadows parking lot are presenting a crowding challenge on weekends, especially as ever-larger Sprinter vans gobble up precious parking real estate. But there is far less fretting about the future here than at other Pacific Northwest ski areas. Most seem captivated by Baker’s spell.

“Baker is a magical place because it’s locally owned,” said Bhagwandin, speaking in the parking lot as her partner, Mike Toohey, waxed snowboards. Toohey quit a snowboard sales director job to live out of a van and run a mobile tune shop.

“Once you get big corporations looking at people as numbers, you lose the vibe,” Bhagwandin said. “For skiing and snowboarding, it’s all about the vibe.”