THE CLIMB: I climbed Mount Hood in May of 2006 through a Portland Parks and recreation guide named Doug. It was me, Doug and two other clients who began the summit at about 4am after a snow cat ride to the top of the Palmer lift at Timberline lodge. There were two others who were in the group but they agreed to try later after more training as they felt their conditioning would prevent the team from summiting. This was a two day course where we trained on traveling while roped up and practicing self arrest and group arrest with an ice axe on the first day.
The climb is considered by some not to be technical although many people have died on this route. The number of casualties are a bit misleading as far as the danger goes since literally thousands of people do attempt this route each year. We climbed from 8500 feet to about 9500 feet on snowshoes before exchanging snowshoes for crampons and roped up (which is mainly for practice as it probably isn't necessary until above the hogsback. From here we headed up to the hogsback which is a ridge about 10,500 above sea level. From here you can smell the sulfur of Devil's kitchen. The scariest part is a few hundred feet above the top of hogsback ridge which passes above the "bergschrund" before entering a slim corridor between two tall sets of icy pinnacles (there are two routes through here depending on which of the "gates" you want to go through). From the above the pearly gates it is only a couple hundred feet to the small pinnacle which is the summit. Unfortunately weather was coming in so we only spent a few moments on the summit before hurrying down. It was scary going back down through the pearly gates as I could see the view of were I would fall while climbing down. After we got back to the hogsback we saw two climbers roped together and crabwalking. We surmised that they had a terrifying experience leading to this extremely cautious method of climbing down. After recovering our snowshoes we took turns riding a sled back down to Timberline lodge.
