Mt Hood, in the afternoon.
The expedition began Sunday afternoon, when we drove down from Seattle. We spent the night at the Troutdale Motel 6, which was serviceable. We got up at 5:30, but didn’t actually get on the trail until about 8:00, between driving and wandering around looking for where to register, etc.
We picked up two hitchhikers in Government Camp, kids who work at the kitchen at the Lodge. One of them smelled terribly of alcohol, and their discussion made me realize I’m glad I’m not 20 anymore. They seem to live a remarkably dissolute and irresponsible life. It's okay, I'm a father, that's the way I'm supposed to sound.
So, we headed up the hill around 8:00. By 8:30 we were at the top of the first chair lift, and stopped for a minute to have a snack and a drink of water. We started out walking up a trail, then dropped down into a ravine with snow in it, which was much cooler out of the sun.
On the drive down I was reading the route descriptions for Mt. Hood in Oregon High, and it was apparent that we should have planned on making a midnight climb, especially with the full moon.
Above the first chair lift things got a little tougher. We were slogging along on the rocks and ash, and occasional patches of snow. It took a pretty long time to get to the top of the second chair lift, and the whole time the grinding of the chair lift filled the air. Today was apparently the last day of summer skiing before the place closed down for two weeks for maintenance, and the lifts were pretty full.
The ski area is oddly rectangular, with regular stripes going down it. It looks really artificial, but the kids we have rides to said they didn’t have a snow machine, they just groomed it and treated the snow with something to keep it from melting.
We ran into a guy lounging in the sun in front of his tent. He had come up the night before intending to summit, but felt a cold coming on, so he was going to bag it. We talked a little about the condition, and he gave us some interesting news: he hadn’t seen anyone going up this morning. We’d planned on it being like Mt. St. Helens last year, hordes of people on the summit, but this was our second indication that it might not be the case. The first one was at the registration, where it looked like most of the registration forms were for the trail around the mountain rather than climbing it.
Above the chair lift, things quieted down. The mountain was still empty. It feels a lot like a smaller version of Rainier; it’s much drier than Baker.
At the top of the gentler slope of the mountain is an interesting feature called Hell’s Kitchen. The air is thick with sulfur fumes, a large slab of the glacier is the color of an overcooked egg yoke, and to the left is Crater Rock, a huge pinnacle with a yellow fumerole on its back, with steam coming out of that.
Looking at Mt. Hood from the south, I'm struck by how similar it is to the view of Mt. St. Helens from the north (the Johnson observatory.) The same horse-shoe shaped summit ridge with the fresh lava rock extruded in the middle. Hood is steeper, of course, and more eroded, and Crater Rock is rather pointy rather than the mushroom-shaped lava dome on St. Helens, (due, I understand, to lava with a higher silica content) but the overall shape is remarkably similar. It seems pretty likely to me that Hood suffered a similar explosion to the 1980 event on St. Helens.
Just before we got there, there was a huge rock slide on the cliffs to the right, called the Steele Cliffs. I’ve heard a lot of rock slides before, but never seen one: it was that big! There were rocks the size of desks falling down, and the rockfall lasted for at least 30 seconds.
Below Hell’s Kitchen, Fred noticed some people coming up from below. Apparently we weren’t going to be the only ones on the mountain. The leader was a woman, tanned dark and quite muscular, wearing one of those jog-bra tops and shorts, and boots with crampons, and ski poles, but no pack. Unlike us, they were moving on the snow, which made lots more sense. After we stopped for a rest, we got down onto the tongue of snow and made much better time moving up the mountain.
We ran into She-rah, queen of the glacier, and her porters Horst and Mike, again at Hell’s Kitchen. She-rah came up first, this time with an ice axe but still no pack, and her faithful retainers followed at a respectful distance.
For a while now it had been obvious that the ascent up the hogback wasn’t going to work, since there was an enormous bergschrund blocking the path, probably 15 feet wide.
Two guys were coming down from the summit, and they told tales of danger and hazard up above, rock falls and terrible snow conditions. After She-rah’s retainers came along, she started gathering up pretty rocks, which apparently they stowed into their packs for her. Fred and I put on our crampons and headed up onto the hogback, and the other three followed behind us.
It was hard going up there, there were crevasses so it was not nearly so carefree as I’d assumed it would be. And, against all expectations, it started to drizzle slightly.
We crossed under the two bergschrunds, and then started to head up the steep snow wall to the left of the hogsback. Fred turned back, thinking we were still a couple of hours from the summit, and he was feeling pretty tired. I was sure that we were pretty close, but of course I should know by now not to make assumptions. It was about 1:40 , and I told him that if I wasn’t at the summit by 2:20, I’d turn around.
I got to the top of the wall, and it seemed like things were flattening out. Fred called to me to ask if I could see the top, and I thought I could, but it was hard to know for sure. The next pitch was a fairly flat (20 degrees or so) of fairly icy snow, and above that was rock. The summit. I yelled for Fred, but couldn't see him, and he couldn't hear me.
The summit of Mt. Hood consists of a rather long rock ridge, a hundred yards or so across. I made it across to the true summit, and to the summit register box just below the summit, in about five minutes. I summitted at around 2:05.
It was cold and windy, and even sleeted a bit. The summit book was full; the box was full of other scraps of paper, a photo or two, and a red flag with Russian writing on it. I tried to document my ascent on a piece of notepaper from my pack, but my pen was dead, and I couldn’t find one in the box that worked. So, I took a picture of the summit box, and the Russian flag*, and got my obligatory summit photo. The box was nestled next to some pieces of lumber and a bunch of cables. There was a fire lookout up there years ago, but it’s pretty well gone now. We passed by a couple of boards on the glacier above Hell’s Kitchen, apparently that’s what they were from.
Looking down Cooper Spur(?)
I took some more pictures, then headed down, stopping to put on gloves for the descent.
Coming down that wall was pretty tricky; I front pointed a lot, and managed to step down some. It wasn’t in nearly as bad condition as that guy had indicated, it must have been his first technical climb. Further down, the slope eased and I was able to walk down the ramps that the snow cups formed. Then, down on the glacier, I made pretty good time.
The descent from the summit took all of two hours, and that includes about twenty minutes just getting down that wall. It wasn’t particularly dangerous, but being solo and unroped, I felt the need to be pretty cautious. It gave me that chance to practice standing vertically on my crampons; on a steep hill, I tend to lean into the slope, which I know I shouldn’t do, but it’s hard to avoid.
The skiing was done for the day, so I just descended down the ski slopes. It wasn’t icy or anything, just a gentle slope. It looks kind of boring, I think, to ride up a chair lift and just slide down, carving turns back and forth, then ride the chair lift back up again. It was quite nice to be able to descend on snow, though, except for the scree slope above Hell’s Kitchen.
I didn’t stop to put anything away, I just hung it all, crampons, gloves and hats, from the caribiners on my pack. I felt pretty good and was moving well, and didn’t want to stop and break my rhythm. It was steep and slippery enough that I was able to slide-step much of the way down to the ski slope. My knees were pretty grateful for the easy descent.
I had been considering asking if I could ride the lift down, but the upper lift had stopped for the day, and I was well below the lower lift hut before I realized it was running. So, I just tromped down the ski slope. It was nice, and pleasant to be out there, and not at all tedious.
Close to the lodge, I got to talk to a couple of little kids about climbing. A little girl named Grace behind me was asking her father why they hadn’t climbed all the way up, and he saw me, and said "Let’s ask him." So, I got to talk to her, and pulled out my crampons to show her, and her little brother (Grace was about four, her little brother about three or less) and it was kind of fun for me. After I put everything back in and took off again, I heard the dad say "See? That was a real mountain climber!" It seemed pretty amusing and odd to see myself through the eyes of those little kids.
Another surprise, less pleasant, was that the battery was dead. Fred had apparently left the lights on. After a couple of tries, we managed to get it bump started, and five minutes later he tested it on the long road down, and the battery was charged right back up. The benefits of driving a small car with a manual transmission. The traffic heading westbound on the highway was just dead stopped, so we headed east to Hood River, and stopped at the Full Sail brewery for dinner. That was a mistake; they make great beer, but the dinner offerings were pretty minimal. And, I-85 from Hood River to Portland was just crawling, we could have walked quicker. Avoid this route on Sunday afternoons.
* I had hoped it was the flag of some Russian climbing club, but when I asked a friend at work who could read Russian, she said it was a production award for some concrete factory. So I was glad I hadn't stolen it after all.