Cascade & Porter

Between work, music, and life, we haven’t had much time to hike. Luckily we had a little time to enjoy what has been a very wintry winter with a short hike to Cascade & Porter.

While I would have loved to snowshoe this route, the entire route was fully packed-out snow and a little soft ice. We needed only our Hillsound trail crampons from start to finish.

Despite being the shortest and easiest pair of Adirondack High Peaks, even these aren’t always “easy”. Hiking was uneventful (but pretty!) until we hit the open summit rock. Upon exiting the cover of the trees, we were immediately hit with constant 30mph winds and gusts high enough to knock me over. I’ve only had winds that strong on Whiteface, Marcy, and Wright Peak, so this was a top 5 wind for me. It was 5F on the summit, so the wind chill would have been around -20F!

Kathy walked, hopped, and crawled to the summit marker.

We made it back to the cover of the treeline and made the nice routine out-and-back to Porter Mountain. It was my tenth time on this pair, and Kathy’s 6th summit of Cascade, 5th of Porter. We made the round trip in less than 4 hours.