WHERE:  from Portland take highway 84 to highway 35 in Hood River.  look for signs north of Parkdale for Cooper Spur ski resort.  Follow to the next sign for the ski resort (I believe it is Cooper Spur road).  Follow this road to Cooper Spur junction where you will take cloud cap road for about 9 miles through many ruts (high clearance or extreme caution is recommended to prevent damage to you vehicle's underbelly).  You will reach one more junction which goes to either Tilly Jane campground or Cloud Cap Campground.  Either one will lead you to a trailhead which ascends Cooper Spur but Cloud cap gives you a couple hundred feet of elevation that you don't have to climb.  It is about a mile to either trailhead from the last junction.

THE HIKE:  This hike was done on October 20th 2009.  There was some recent snowfall on the mountain and patchy snow was encountered shortly after the trailhead.  The Cloud Cap trailhead starts at about 5800 feet.  It is about 1/4 mile from the roads end which culminates at Cloud Cap Inn which is the headquarters for the Mount Hood Crag Rats (a mountaineering club which also handles mountain rescues).  They purchased the Inn, which was built by a private entrepreneur in 1889, in the middle of the last century from the forest service.  The club agreed to maintain the Inn and allow it to be used for mountain rescues as condition of the purchase.

The hike quickly meets the timberline trail (which circumnavigates Mt. Hood) then goes up about 700 feet over 1.1 miles to a junction with the Tilly Jane trail which continues up Cooper Spur.  The Cooper spur shelter is just up the trail from this junction. It is often used by mountaineers who are planning on summiting Hood from this dangerous route as a base camp.  It is a stone shelter which does offer protection from the weather, although if you need this protection for severe weather you probably should not be climbing.  We took this trail for about 2.1 miles (we stayed on the steeper ridge route rather than taking the tamer route that zig zags) to 8600 feet elevation.  The trail was fairly steep for a hiking trail but the ground was relatively sturdy but a bit gravelly with lots of rocks.  The top of the trail is on the ridge of Cooper Spur and is right between Elliot and Newton Clark Glaciers.  The view of these glaciers which culminate a few hundred feet below is spectacular.  The glaciers seem more like the ones you see on a national geographic special on Patagonia than the typical glaciers of Oregon.  It was really beautiful as the sun finally hit the bottom of Elliot Glacier and the snows evaporation quickly formed beautiful clouds below and also streaming in from the north side of the mountain.  The views to the north included Mount Adams, Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens while to the south you can see Jefferson, and the Three sisters vicinity.  Looking east there is a great view of the desert beyond and to the north you can see the magnificent albeit smaller mountains of the Columbia River Gorge.  The icy juts and many crevasses also contrast with the standard south side climb of the mountain.  The trail ends as the ridge begins to be absorbed by the mountain.  At this point it steepens to about 50 degrees which means that anyone aspiring to summit from here should be roped up as a fall from up slope would most likely lead to death:  There is nothing that could stop such a fall until you hit the crevasses or icy pinnacles of Elliot or Newton Clark Glaciers.  Although I have seen trip reports claim that a summit attempt from here is not technical I would beg to differ.  Anything is not technical if you can do it with out falling, unless you are climbing a rock ledge or an ice fall.  The problem here is that it is so steep a fall would almost certainly be a disaster without a rope for security and even people who were roped up have died on this route.  It is particularly dangerous when the sun hits the slopes and the snow softens  leading to increased slide danger.

Elliot Glacier