March 5, 2005, Cascade Pass

Chan, Ryan and I had the goal of skiing Sahale Arm yesterday.  We ended up with a shorter, but enjoyable, tour to Cascade Pass.  Here are the details.

Cascade River Road is now open to a gate at MP 21.  The road is pretty much dry and snow free all the way to the Cascade Pass trailhead.  It could be opened up except for two issues that will require a little clean up/repair work.  There is alot of slide debris (mostly rocks soccer ball size and smaller and lots of unconsolidated dirt/gravel) at the first switchback after the gate.  There is also a spot around MP 22 where the asphalt has buckled due to the road bed washing out underneath.    

We hiked up the road (2 miles) to the trailhead and found the basin below Cascade Pass to have amazingly low snow cover (see photo below).  Slopes with south to southwest exposure were nearly bare all the way up to Sahale Arm.  We decided to take the summer trail and walked all the way to the pass in sneakers!  The trail was 99% snow free and dry up to about 5000 ft.  The last few hundred feet we traversed softened snow to the pass.  Wind was howling though the pass and the cloud cover seemd to be building with dark grey clouds visible as far west as we could see.  By the time we finished lunch, it was starting to snow lightly.  

It being 2pm at that time, the weather looking like it would get worse before it got better, the lack of sun available to soften snow on Sahale Arm - all these factors led us to decide it was time to descend back down to the car.  We skinned up the shoulder of Cascade Peak (south from the pass) about 500 v.f.  We could see the arm from our high point.  It looked like coverage was already spotty up there, but there were continuous skiiable lines.  Our new goal was to ski the slopes below Cascade peak that had Northwest exposure and appeared to have good coverage for at least 1000 v.f. back toward the trailhead.  

We found the top 1200 v.f. or so to be pretty fun, albeit inconsistent snow surface with shallow wind deposits among a hardpack, avalanche scoured surface.  We were able to ski continuosly down another 800 v.f. with careful route finding in avalanche runouts lower in the basin.  Snow stability was generally not an issue as the snowpack was shallow and frozen for most of our descent.  There was some softer slushy snow lower down on more western exposures.  I sketched our line on this photo (a line which I would never ski without a very stable snowpack due to its proximity under Cascade Peak and the ridge connecting to Johannesburg):



That's Chan and Ryan at the trailhead picnic area.  Notice the dry grass.  As you can see in the photo, the weather blew through and the sky cleared up by the time we reached the bottom.  

In the end we hiked 3000 v.f., skinned up an additional 500 v.f. and got about 2000 v.f of relatively fun skiing.  About 1200 v.f of our walk out was on the road.

I hope to post more pictures soon - any recommendations for a free online photo album host site?  

-Eric