Yeah, timberline tends to be low -- a bit above 4,800 feet, actually, but there is a trail that circumnavigates the mountain at that contour so that was a convenient line to draw.

Weather is very harsh on the Cascade peaks -- LOTS and LOTS of snow.

I was hiking on Mt. St. Helens once in late June, and there were still snow banks at the 5,000 foot level. Another year I was hiking near the Three Sisters in Oregon (150 miles south of St. Helens), there were still little snow drifts in shaded hollows in early August.

Most amazing, though, was when I drove around Rainier in what had been a very heavy snow year, 1996 or 1997, I forget. At the 5,500 foot level the snow was still eight feet deep -- on June 1st. It's not unheard of for Rainier to get 100 feet of snow in a season at that elevation.

Heh, it also makes it possible to spend a morning doing summer skiing on Mt. Hood (a lift above 7000 feet is open year-round), then put on swim trunks and go windsurfing on the Columbia River that afternoon, only 30 miles away.

Get up into North Cascades Natl Park (the northern most 100 mi or so of the Cascades in WA state), and you have glaciers coming down to very low elevations. I've never been up there myself, but I've flown over it and it is very rugged -- you'd think you were landing in Alaska, not Seattle. The first road across that stretch of the range wasn't built until the 1970s, and it's only open half the year.