David and David and I spent the weekend skiing the Cascade Pass area, one of my favorite places in the state. It required a 3 mile hike just to get to the trailhead. Part of it had to cross a massive avalanche with granite and trees that had crossed the road, I don't imagine Cascade River Road will open any time soon. We had our sights set on skinning all the way up the Sahale Arm (click here for pictures from last fall) and maybe summiting Sunday morning, but the weather on Saturday really was not ideal. It was thick clouds and snowing all day. We made it about a 1000 feet up the arm from the pass, navigating from tree island to tree island in the dense fog before turning back and camping at the pass.

We thought about making a summit attempt at 530 Sunday morning, but it was as cloudy as ever. So we slept two more hours instead. While eating breakfast a few sun breaks appeared. We decided to climb up the southern arm from the pass towards Johannesburg Peak instead. As we went the weather cleared completely up. I had a good hour where I took some phenomenal pictures. We then skied down into the Stehikin Basin before going up to the pass and skiing back down to the Cascade Pass trailhead. We decided to forgo crossing the avalanche debris by skiing around. This required some bushwhacking and stream crossing, we weren't quite sure if was worth the effort.

All in all, it was a fantastic weekend. A two hour weather window making all the effort worthwhile. (David thought it was harder than our Mt. Hood trip last summer).