Cascade Ice Guidebook

A few weeks ago, I published a list of Forgotten Alpine Ice Route of the Cascades. It was met with a lot of enthusiasm and positivity. One experienced local climber, Daniel Smith, reached out to me about creating a new online guidebook for alpine ice climbing in the Cascades. There really isn’t much information on this subject – some scattered across mountain project, CascadeClimbers.com, the Beckey Guides, and the Washington Ice Book – so I readily agreed.

A few weeks of late night coding and writing route descriptions got me to the initial version: cascade-ice.com.

I tried to integrate modern tools like caltopo to bring the guidebook experience into the 21st century. You can browse routes by difficulty and region, look at a map of climbs, view route topos, and approach maps. The sections about climber quotes and history bring personality to the entries. Rendering on mobile is sleek.

Find routes on a map.
Browse Routes.
Caltopo approach maps.

Currently, we only have 8 routes, but Daniel has been working to compile information and photos on dozens of classic and obscure alpine routes. By next winter, we hope to have at least 20 routes!

Thanks to Daniel for motivating me to work on this project. It was a great distraction during quarantine. I revamped my front end web development skills and am proud of the product I produced.

Check out cascade-ice.com!

2 thoughts on “Cascade Ice Guidebook”

    1. Yeah I’ve been too busy reviving the Cascade Backcountry Alliance to invest time here. Someone reached out to me about working on it but then they went silent. I think it would be about $20 per year to put the website back up, but the ice observations page really needs a bit of admin work to upload the observations since there’s no automated submissions.

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