Climbed the cascade slide on Saturday 3/1 with Jim46 and several others from NYM. We decided to do it alpine style and camp near the top of the slide. I climbed the slide last year around this time and there was much more snow cover then but it was very similar conditions.
The first pitch is the longest and we used just about all of the 60M rope to top it out. As we were getting setup at the base, there were quite a few people on the slide and a good amount of falling ice from other climbers, glad I had my helmet on or it would have been a bad weekend as I got hit right on the head with a large chunk, no damage but it was a good reminder to some of the less experienced climbers in our group not to look up when someone yells ICE! and to give each other a bit of space. After the icefall we waited a bit to let others get higher so it would be a bit more spread out.
The crowd on the waterfall
Top section of the waterfall
From the top of the waterfall we continued on and free climbed some of the smaller sections and used the rope for the longer ones. We stayed on the side of caution and used the rope whenever there was a question to the safety.
After topping out at the last section of ice we setup our camp for the night.
Once our camp was setup we headed for the summit to see if we could make it there for sunset.
A few shots from the climb up
We made it to the summit just before dark and were able to take in some of the views
After summiting we headed back down to camp. Some of the icier sections we had to down climb due to the ice under the thin layer of snow but we had no issues and didn't need to use our rope for the descent to camp.
Once back at camp we made our dinners, hung out for a bit and headed off to our tents for the night. The night was fairly windy but nothing I would call significant just a few rattles of the tent during the night.
Sunday AM we woke to a few inches of snow on the tents. We packed up our gear and started the trip down the slide.
We rappelled down all of the icy sections and used two ropes to rap down the waterfall section at the bottom rather than rap down in the woods.
Once back down the the lake we walked back to our cars for a nice breakfast at the Noonmark.
Full photo set is here on flickr: [url]http://flic.kr/s/aHsjTNHhb3[/url]
