Cascade Mountain // Do Not Follow Me

If you’re lucky you might find yourself one warm summer day eating poutine outside in the crowded but quaint town of Banff. If you were to take a momentary pause from your poutine routine and look to the north you would see a large mountain made up of loose rock and cliff bands looming over the town like a disappointed and angry parent. That mountain is called Cascade. Which I assume is the name given to any mountain discovered by someone with little to no imagination. The question I asked myself after climbing it is, why out of all the hundreds of awesome peaks in the area did I choose to climb this one? First of all, it’s on everybody’s list of climbs or scrambles that one must do when in the Banff area. Second, I read an article more than a decade ago about this thrilling scramble near the town of Banff and mistakenly attributed that scramble to Cascade Mountain. And last of all, we were desperate to find something last minute and I think we just plucked the low hanging fruit of the Canadian Rockies. In the end it turned out to be a great hike but not a scramble. At least not a scramble according to my definition. But definitely a scramble due to the fact that the top half of the mountain is made up of mostly loose rock and you do a lot of scrambling around trying to find solid footing. The hilarious part is that, even though I would consider this mountain a quick day hike, I still managed to go the wrong way and get cliffed up.