Adirondack Hikes...Cascade Mt.

Has anyone ever done the Cascade Mt. Slide? If so, approximately how long does it take? Other info is appreciated. Thanks!

If you're talking about continuing up from the waterfall between the two Cascade Lakes, it's really quick (less than an hour car to summit), if all the duffy stuff isn't wet and threatening to send you sliding downhill. Hint: it's more like the Macomb slide (not the cleanest!) than, say, the ones on Colden. As always, YMMV.

Oops!! I meant the Colden slides... any more input?

Which slide on Colden, there are two that I think see relatively regular ascents (there are more of course). The one on the west side, approached from Avalanche Lake and the one on the east side, approached from the trail between Lake Arnold and um, the uphill lean-to (or something like that).

I have done the west side one once in summer and once in winter. In summer, you can expect about 30ish feet of 5.0 climbing. This can be annoying when wet because the climbing is in a stream bed and your climbing can be wet. Once over that, you find an easy way onto the slide itself (I think it's now marked with a small cairn) and just hike steeply up the clean slab directly to the summit. In winter, conditions vary. The day I did it, there were two steps of ice (you can expect two steps fairly regularly I think), the lower step being longer than the upper step. Then I had deep snow plodding until I broke onto the slab and then it was a strange mixture of snow, crunchy snow, and ice.

In the summer, I descended the trail to Lake Arnold. In the winter, I just reversed my route and rappelled the two ice steps. (sketchy tree rap on the lower step).

Our summertime round trip was like 9 hours. My wintertime round trip was a bit less than that if I remember correctly.

I snowshoed in, but, if I do it again, I think I will xcountry ski in.

Colden, not Cascade, now there's a major difference.

Sam's time for the Colden trapdike and slide in winter was 7 or 7.25 hours car-to-car, which IMO is quite good.

The benefit of a winter ascent of the Colden trapdike/slide is that you can (usually!) walk across Avalanche Lake to the trapdike; if the lake isn't frozen, you have to walk around the south end of the lake and then go a bit north to the trapdike entrance.

The slide above the trapdike goes directly to the summit. The new slides (well, kinda new, they're from Hurricane Flloyd in 1999) on the west side of Colden are clean, but they don't go anywhere near the summit.

The slide on the SE side of Colden would probably best be reached from the Upper Works, whereas the ones on the west side are best reached from Heart Lake. The SE slide is pretty new (c. 1990 or 1991), but it's a fairly heinous bushwhack to the summit from its top-- at least a quarter mile, perhaps a half, and the scrubby trees are a total terror. Best descent would probably be down the trail on the west side down to Lake Colden. A day trip from the Upper Works in summer would probably be 10 hours round trip at a moderately motivated pace. Much would depend on how long the short distance from the top of the slide to the summit takes. Bring gauze pads and industrial safety goggles for it.

The western slide AKA the Trap Dike is generally a scare-fest of thinly glazed rock until late in the winter. It can also avalanche. I know of one fatality where a climber slid/fell all the way to the lake. It is not to be taken lightly (Strat's such a stud-muffin!). In the summer OTOH it is a great route up the peak. The north wall of the Dike is amazing to look at, and as a rock climber you'll be vowing to come back someday with gear. Of course, like everyone else who says this, you won't.

I haven't been on the other side of the mountain, but I'll second Bob's suggestion to wear goggles. I can't believe we never did this back in my college peak-bagging years, but in the last 3 years I've had two twigs go right into my eye. It's really scary, esp. if - as I have - you've known someone who got a corneal infection. Not a pretty situation, even if you keep the vision in that eye.

(Strat's such a stud-muffin!).

I will agree with that.
Sam is too modest to say but not only did he do the Trap Dike and return in under 7.5 hours
BUT
he made linguine and clam sauce on the summit of Colden;
he refinished a walking stick while glissading down the slide;
he typed an enviromental report on his laptop wihle hiking out.
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Yeah - mistaking Cascade with Colden is easy
They do both begin with the letter C


Cheerios

clam sauce? Clam Sauce?? CLAM SAUCE???
NEVER, Fred, you know me better than that!

<<he made linguine and clam sauce on the summit of Colden>>
That's so out of character. Sam is a radiatore and bolognese sauce man if I've ever met one.

That evening he had dinner with D-elvis and me at Nicola's (we had done RB Falls and Multiplication Gully that day, none of this hiking appproach stuff for us!), and I was impressed that for dessert Sam had Jack Daniels, then got into his jeep and drove to Highland, NY, 3 hours away. Mike Rawdon is incorrect, he's not a stud muffin, he's the whole damned bakery!

At the risk of interrupting this nonsense , I have some useful information to add to my comments about the Trap Dike. I think my time on the winter Trap Dike trip was short for two reasons. 1) Reversing the route means I only had to carry some water and climbing gear up the mountain and wasn't weighted down and it gets you back to Avalanche Lake in about 35 minutes as opposed to the hour plus it would take to walk down to Lake Arnold and re-connect with the trail to Marcy Dam and 2) The snow was such that anywhere there was a good enough incline on the trail, I could run/slide down quite easily.

Having said that, reversing the route IMO is a highly condition dependant option. The day I did it, the conditions made this relatively safe. I wouldn't want to do that if it was more icy or if the snow was thin. Having said that, I don't know how you could have judged what the conditions were going to be like on the slab until you got there and if it turned out they were not good to reverse the route, I would have descended into the gulley to the north of the Trap Dike and fought my way through the trees until back into the dike. It would not have been pretty, but, eyeballing it, I'm pretty sure it woulda got me back down.

I had a 9 hour window of good weather and I'd been wanting to do it for two years and that was my last chance, so, I struck!

Oh and MurphysLaw and I did 4 or 5 routes at Deep Notch the day after.