From Terrence’s WTA Report

We are the Mountain Goats, Terrence (14) and Nathan (16). We've been pretty busy hiking and climbing, but not always in Washington, so this is our first trip report in awhile! Today one of us (Terrence) Climbed Cashmere Mountain.

The trail up to Little Eight Mile Lake is flat and easy its about 3 miles total and you gain a little over 1000 feet (it took us about 1 hour going up). From there the quality of the trail goes downhill. You begin to ascend a rocky ridge and begin to see views of Mt Stuart and eight mile lake. Once you hit the top of the ridge you almost instantly see another ridge - that is where your headed.

The trail up to Lake Caroline is very similar to the trail up to the first ridge. By now you are around 5200 feet high and the top of the ridge is 6400". This section of the trail gains about 1200" in 2 miles making it fairly steep. Once your at the top of ridge you get amazing views of Lake Caroline and Windy Pass and your destination, Cashmere Mountain. You descend about 300 feet down to the lake but the trail does not go all the way to the lake instead it goes along the east side of the lake heading north.

The next part of the trail is very enjoyable as you slowly head towards Windy Pass through miles of meadows getting great views of Cashmere mountains. We probably saw 4-7 marmots running across the trail or just chillin. About a mile and a half from Lake Caroline the trail begins to go up to Windy Pass and this is where we cut of from the trail. We followed a faint climbers path that cut the final few switch backs up to Windy Pass. From there we followed the trail for about a mile, along the huge west ridge of Cashmere, until we hit a large boulder field. This part was hard to navigate but we hopped boulders, and a bit of snow, for about 30 minutes until we hit the summit block.

This part of the climb was by far the most challenging - it is nearly impossible to follow the "route." The trail heads east on the north side of mountain, but we headed up and over to the south side of the mountain ( off trail) and found a class class 3 section to the summit. Staying on the trail is very difficult and the easiest way to get to the summit is to keep heading east, and circle the mountain until you find an easy way the top. It's challenging to even know when you are at the top, as there are several false summits - the way you know you're at the top is because there is a summit register! And the true is pretty far east. The true summit is very small, maybe enough room for 1 person. By this time it was almost 1 and it took us almost 7 hours to get to the top. We found the actual "trail" which drops straight down the North side of the mountain and which is very dusty, but it's less technical - We stayed on the trail till we hit a faint climbers trail off of the west ridge that drops straight into the valley heading towards Lake Caroline, that probably saved us 1.5 miles. From there we just took the trail down to Lake Caroline and then down to Little Eight Mile Lake. By the time we hit the trailhead it was 6:30 12.5 hours after we started. Overall i would say its very doable as an 1 day hike but car camping is highly recommended and helmets are too!

Our GPS track with the shortcuts was 17.3 miles and you gain 5537 feet If you stay on the trail the whole way its around 20 miles round trip.

Thanks for reading and Happy Hiking!