Mount Baker Highway to Artist Point
— — the road that climbs until the snow takes it back.
Not only on a wall.
“The drive climbs from sea level in Bellingham to about five thousand feet at the end of the pavement. State Route 542, the Mount Baker Highway, works its way up the Nooksack valley, past silver firs and roadside cascades, ending in a parking circle below Mount Shuksan and Mount Baker. The road opens for roughly three months a year. By November the snow has come back and the gate closes. The ski area just below holds the world record for snowfall in a winter: 1,140 inches in the 1998-99 season. The road waits under it until late summer remembers.
Mount Baker Highway to Artist Point, on ceramic.
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The place, in three passes.
State Route 542 leaves Interstate 5 in Bellingham, Washington, and climbs east through the Nooksack River valley to its terminus at Artist Point, an elevation of about 5,140 feet (1,567 m) in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. The full drive is roughly 58 miles. The final mile passes the Mt. Baker Ski Area at Heather Meadows, the small alpine basin set between Mount Shuksan (9,131 ft) to the east and Mount Baker (10,781 ft) to the west. The U.S. Forest Service designates the upper road as a National Forest Scenic Byway. Above Heather Meadows the asphalt is gated by snow for most of the year and only plowed open during the short summer window.
The Mt. Baker Ski Area, sitting at about 4,300 feet just below Artist Point, holds the official world record for measured seasonal snowfall: 1,140 inches in the 1998-99 winter, verified by the U.S. National Climatic Data Center. That number is what makes the summer drive feel possible at all. For most of the year the road above the lodge lies under twenty or thirty feet of snow. The Nooksack River carries the meltwater back down the same valley the road climbs, a steady cold green from spring through fall. Pacific moisture rides in off Puget Sound and stalls against the North Cascades, dropping that record load every winter.
Artist Point is closed by snow for roughly nine months of the year. The Forest Service typically reopens the final miles of State Route 542 in late July or early August, depending on the snow year, and closes them again by mid- to late October. The brief alpine summer brings paintbrush, lupine, and avalanche lilies through the heather slopes; by September the huckleberry and mountain ash turn red against the volcanic ridges. The first reliable snowfall returns to the meadows by November and the gate goes back up below the ski area. The high road exists only in the gap between.