Baring Mountain

Oct 14, 2006

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Friday night rolled around and we still hadn’t decided on our weekend scramble. Steve’s hip was still giving him quite a bit of pain so we wanted a short easy scramble on Saturday. Smoot’s book states that Baring is a class 2, 6 mile outing, so we settled on it. We started on the boot path from the Barclay Lake trailhead (not the trail to Barclay Lake) at 10:30 AM. We quickly arrived at the gully and started up a steep dirt path, reaching the ridge around noon. We were at a little over 4000’ and estimated that we must have already covered a couple of miles. Wasn’t the summit over 6000’? Rising 2000’ in less than a mile did not sound like class 2 terrain. Hmmm, this outing was going to be longer than advertised. We continued on the boot path along the tree covered ridge and then on a slightly descending traverse onto the south side. The path then headed up to the edge of a large talus basin. We used a trail on the left of the talus to descend into the basin. It terminated at the base of the talus basin, so we headed into the talus and slowly made our way up to the saddle between the summit and false summit. We followed the boot path for most of the last 400’ of elevation gain, but took a short detour into some class 3 scrambling before rejoining the boot path in the open heather. We reached the summit around 3:00 PM. After taking a few photos, we descended a few hundred feet and had lunch. The hike out was slow, but eventful. We reached the trailhead at 6:30 PM. Turns out the RT distance to Baring is 9 miles. This would make a fun outing when snow covered.    

Gully that leads to the saddle between the summit and the false summit

USGS marker near the summit

Steve on the summit

Merchant Peak

Baring Mountain