A typical view of wildflowers (lupin and paintbrush) growing amidst the charred trees.
My family, a friend and his son were all heading over to Leavenworth for the 4th of July weekend. Obviously, I needed to climb something. I borrowed the Leavenworth rock guidebook from Lee, and leafed through it, mouth watering. I'm a novice (at best) on rock, so I was looking for the easy stuff. I had the idea that Midway on Castle Rock would be cool, and at 5.5, it would be well within my capabilities. But Lee said that the chimney that starts it is pretty sketchy since it's been climbed so much.
So, looking and agonizing and then worrying about the crowds of a 3-day weekend, I decided to chicken out and do Cashmere Mountain. I've been wondering about it for a while, and while it's less technical than I'd have liked, it would have me back before dark, a consideration for me.
So, Cashmere it was. Alex said he could go; so he drove up Friday evening and got to the house we'd rented on the Icicle right around midnight.
We were slow getting out; we hit the road about 6:30, and after a grueling ten minutes of driving (Alex heroically did the whole thing himself!), we were at the trailhead.
So, we hit the trail about 6:45. The trail is pretty easy, not particularly steep, quite easy to follow. It's really a hiking trail, not at all a climber's trail. At lower Eight-Mile lake, we turned up the hill, as the instructions indicate. Absolutely no problems following the trail.
This is a wildflower-lover's climb. The higher we got, the more lush the flowers got -- lupins everywhere, queen's cup, the classic orange columbine, wild bleeding heart, heather in bloom, bunchberry, thistle, and dozens more I don't know the name of. Further up was the succulent stonecrop, in the sand around the summit scramble.
We saw lots of evidence of fires, recent and old. Lower down we passed partially burned trees that were covered with overgrowth, further up there was a long expanse of dead standing trees.
One surprising thing -- there were mountain bike tire tracks on the trail, pretty high up. By the look of things, there was one bike that went up, and back down. The tracks were well above Windy pass, which makes sense; it would be an easy ride up there, though the beginning of the trail would be more difficult -- at least for me.
We got to Windy Pass by about 11:00, not bad time. The views were pretty nice, although it was cloudy enough that we couldn't see the summit of Stuart, or of Cashmere.
The route description says to follow the ridge to the summit rocks. There's an intermittent crag on the ridge, and you can save some time by staying below (climber's right) of it, and not screwing around on those rocks. We didn't, because we couldn't see well enough through the clouds, and wanted to stay right up on the ridge as much as possible.
We got to the summit, with some fun 4th class scrambling, by around noon. There was no summit register, just half a register tube laying there. So I stuck an old-fashioned ice screw which I had in my pack left over from our ice climbing last month, into a crack at the summit. It's useless on ice; we'll see how long it is before someone kypes it.
There was a rusty bent-over quarter-inch bolt on one of summit rocks, as though someone had put a rappel bolt up there. No hanger, though.
We hung out up there for half an hour or so. My new GSM-service cell phone worked marvelously up there, no service problems whatsoever. We took photos, relaxed, and I tried to fly my kite (not enough wind), and then headed down.
We decided to descend down the scree slopes to the south. This was a mistake. If I did it again, I'd have stayed as close to the climbing route as possible, and getting back onto the ridge trail, rather than slogging though the scree and the meadows. I really hate scree. This wasn't quite as bad as descending Thompson or Black Peak, but it was pretty obnoxious.
Looking across the Icicle valley to the Stuart Range; Dragontail in the center above Colchuck Lake, Colchuck Peak to the right, and Argonaut far right. Little Annapurna is barely visible to the left of Dragontail.
In the winter, ground squirrels dig tunnels through the snow, and line them with dirt. When the snow melts, it leaves these casts, basically fossils of tunnels. They're pretty cool, I think.
Someone suggested to me, after seeing my kite flying on the summit of Rainer, that you could use a large kite-boarding-type kite to cross crevasses. I wonder how large a kite you'd have to have in order to glide down over this scree?
The hike down was pretty routine. A surprising number of people, and tents, on the way down. We got to the car around 4:45, and drove back to the house for beers and showers.