[Randy]

This one starts in the North Fork Snoqualmie drainage at 2180' where Road 57 is closed because of a slide just after the Bare Mountain trailhead. We left the truck at 0700 and walked the road until reaching a junction with spur road 210 at 2440'. We took the spur road and found the old trailhead shortly after. The trail is generally passable and well defined, although it has its share of rocks, mud holes, and blowdowns. At 4200' the trail begins to traverse the upper part of the basin making up the headwaters of Lennox Creek. Here, the route goes through heather benches and polished slabs that were rather treacherous this morning as the previous days runoff had frozen solid making foot placement all the more important. Eventually the trail reaches Anderson Pass at 4640' with great vies out to the Middle Fork drainage and down to Anderson Lake. At the pass, we abandoned the trail and headed east on talus passing just south of Point 5312' and then continued through heather and talus slopes at roughly 5100' to just south of Point 5423'. We gained the notch just west of Morpheus at 5300' and then went up the narrow west ridge to the summit. The ridge is a 200' cliff to the north and a steep duff slope to the south choked with small fir trees that make the going tedious, but not really difficult. The first known ascent of Morpheus was not until 1995 and since then only two other parties had signed the register although there are two other ascents that are known to have occurred. Views from the top were quite impressive being a clear and cold fall day. After gaining the summit at 1030, we left promptly at 1045 heading NE towards Cascade Mountain. We traversed on the south side of the ridge line which went fine until we met up with the spine heading towards Dream Lake and just south of Point 5364'. We had dropped to 4800' to get around this spine only to have to climb up 200' of ugly cliff bands while swinging from tree branches to get around it! Once finally through and around, we dropped more elevation and bounced into the gap just west of Point 5196'. From here we cut over to the north side of Point 5196' and had to loose 200' to avoid some icy cliff bands to make the traverse go. Once below the cliffs, we basically ascended the west slopes of Cascade to the base of the SW ridge at 5400'. The SW ridge looked easy enough from below, but actually had its share of class 3-4 rock with plenty of exposure in places. The summit register dated back to 1995, but evidently Cascade doesn't get too much traffic as there were only 4 or 5 entries. After 20 minutes on top, we left the summit at 1315 and headed back on basically the same route we used on the way in. We did avoid the ridiculous spine by going high and dropping over the other side of the ridge where we traversed back over to the notch just west of Morpheus. It was a relief to be back at Anderson Pass as I had come down with a cold just the day before and was out of energy and really dragging butt at that point. Luckily Mike, being the nice guy that he is, didn't seem to mind my slower than average pace throughout the day. We eventually made it back down to the road and then back to the truck at 1815.