Mt Baker

The camera stands on the summit, on a patch of bare volcanic grit blown clear in the middle of the snow dome, and there is a climber sitting on it with a board laid down beside him. From here everything is below. On one side the ground drops to a snow-covered peak whose rock is stained yellow and rust brown around a hollow - that is Sherman Crater, which vents steam continuously and is the reason there is bare warm ground anywhere near the top of this mountain. Past it the land falls away through ridge after ridge of dark forest with a lake in the bottom, and the North Cascades run out to the horizon in every direction, blue with distance. There is nothing higher in view. The snow underfoot is sun-cupped into a rough honeycomb, which is what a summer snowfield does at altitude.

Mount Baker is a glaciated stratovolcano in the North Cascades of Washington, 10,781 feet high and the third tallest mountain in the state. It is also still an active volcano: the crater south of the summit vents steam continuously and is the second most thermally active in the Cascade Range, after Mount St Helens. The last serious episode was in 1975, when fumarole activity in Sherman Crater increased sharply enough to close the area around Baker Lake for a season.

What Baker is best known for is snow. In the winter of 1998-99 the Mount Baker Ski Area recorded 1,140 inches - ninety-five feet - in a single season, which remains the world record for measured seasonal snowfall. The mountain sits in the path of wet Pacific air that runs straight up against the range and drops everything it is carrying, so a typical winter still brings well over 600 inches. That is what feeds the glaciers, and what has made a mid-sized ski area with no pretensions into one of the best known in North America.

The ski area itself is deliberately unfashionable - no destination village, no high-speed everything, a lot of steep and expert terrain, and the Legendary Banked Slalom every winter, which draws a couple of hundred of the best snowboarders in the world to a natural halfpipe carved out of a creek bed. It is a little further from Seattle than the other Washington resorts; allow two and a half hours from the Puget Sound cities.