The night before, snow had accumulated on the slopes of Cascade Mountain, putting our plans in question. But a moderately sunny day helped to clear that off in time.
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| False summit (right) and real summit (left) from the amphitheatre |
The hike to the Cascade amphitheatre took a lot longer than expected, with a total distance of about 6.5km and 540m of elevation gain from the lowest point. While the amphitheatre is somewhat impressive, there isn't a payoff tarn or anything like that, just a lot of rubble. We had lunch and proceeded onwards.
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| Coming up on the false summit and the three exposed sections |
Up to the false summit, the trail is quite obvious (follow the cairns), although not always easy. Once we rounded the corner from the straightforward sections, ahead lay the scrambly bits. Hands were not really required anywhere, but a misstep would result in a long fall.
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| A rainbow in the valley between Cascade and Sira |
There were a few other groups doing the route, but we had the summit to ourselves for a good 15 minutes. Most of that time was spent looking for places where the wind wasn't too fierce.
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| It was cold on the summit! |
Unfortunately, due to cloud cover, we couldn't see a whole lot from the summit except brief glances.
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| Rare photo of the two of us |
Eventually, we decided that it would be more comfortable to take our summit break lower down in a sheltered area just before the first exposed bit. We had lunch, then made our way back down while being pelted by high winds and tiny hail.
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| Heading back down, out of the mist |
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| One of the 3 exposed slopes that we needed to traverse |
In the end, the amount of distance covered was more than I expected (19.15km), but we made it back to the car in a reasonable amount of time (9h15m). It was good to feel warm again.
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