Mt. Hood, Leuthold Couloir
 Sunday, Jan 28, 2001. With James M.

I left the house, and picked up James right about midnight, and off we went. The drive down to Mt. Hood was hairy at times, because of the fog. There were spots where I couldn’t see a thing, except sometimes taillights faintly ahead of me, and driving at 70mph was unnerving.

If you’ve only climbed the hogsback route, you may have a pretty cynical view of Mt. Hood. Grandmas climb it, and gradeschoolers, it’s more like Mt. St. Helens than a "real mountain." The record for most ascents is held by a dog, and two five-year olds have summited it. As soon as you get off the south snowfield, though, it’s a completely different mountain, far more alpine and a lot more interesting.

We left the parking lot around 5:00 AM, and got to the Illumination rock saddle by around 8:00 after numerous pauses to enjoy a really dramatic sunrise.


Sunrise to the south, Mt Jefferson on the horizon, the tops of the lift towers on the left.


The shadow of Mt. Hood spread over Portland

A party had dug a really marvelous snow cave up there below Illumination rock, and we spent a few minutes admiring it. It was incredible; they had a separate kitchen, and the entrance into the main cave was small enough that they could block the entrance with a pack, but inside it was practically big enough to stand up. They’d spent about four hours digging it, they said, and it was by far the nicest snow cave I’ve seen.

Illumination rock at sunrise. The snow cave is the small dot on the right.

One of the challenging aspects of this route is the routefinding. I had Oregon High with me (checked out yet again from the King County Library) and the photo showing the route was not much use, since it was taken when the mountain was completely covered with snow, obscuring the rock formations. The route description says that the couloir parallels Yokum Ridge, and it does, but it’s important to know that it’s also the couloir that’s closest to the ridge. When you descend down onto the Reid Glacier, you look up and there are three or four different couloirs that look like they might be right. We were fortunate to have footprints to follow. Basically, you traverse as far to the left as you can, and follow the couloir right up next to the ridge.

Some people we met at the saddle said that Leuthold Couloir has a distinctive hourglass shape. We did see a couloir above us that seemed to fit that description, but it was pretty far to the right. Indications from the book are that it probably goes, but we didn’t want to spend a couple of hours exploring, and then end up having to downclimb.

We roped up after we got down off the the Illumination Saddle. Maybe too conservative, but better safe than sorry.


Traversing the upper Reid Glacier

The couloir is pleasantly steep (40-45 degrees sounds about right) not steep enough to require belaying, but steep enough to be interesting. The snow was of pretty good quality most of the time. One concern was that in the lower narrow part of the couloir (it’s probably less than ten feet wide at the bottom) a fair amount of ice chips and marble-sized rocks were tumbling down. We found a sheltered spot to wait a bit and watch what was coming down, to see how big the chunks of ice got. There were a number of them the size of golf balls, but didn’t seem to get much bigger than that, so we decided to push on. The surface was pretty hard, often a good kick only put my crampons and boots a few inches into the snow.

A couple of hundred feet up, the couloir widens out considerably, and the hazard is greatly reduced. In fact, we didn’t notice any falling debris at all up there. The route meanders nicely, so you’re constantly seeing new stuff above, and when you look back, the scenery drops away satisfyingly. Unfortunately, anything you drop also drops away, not so satisfyingly. I contributed an OR glove shield to the ecology of the Reid glacier partway up, and boy did it fall a long way!


Looking down the couloir from above the hourglass

I brought an ice tool as well as my ice axe, and used it. I didn’t feel like it was particularly necessary, but I kept using it mostly to avoid the hassle of putting it back into my pack. The lower hundred feet or so is steep enough that the ice tool gives a nice feeling of security. Most of the time it wasn’t hard enough to use the pick, but there were spots where the snow and ice were too hard to sink the shaft of my ice axe very far, and the ice tool was pretty convenient then.

One of the drawbacks to the hogsback route (to me) is that you see the whole route all the way up, and there’s no drama, no surprise. The Leuthold Couloir route is a quite varied route; when you finally exit the couloir at the top of Yokum Ridge, you continue up the dome of the mountain, and from there, across the summit ridge to the true summit. I read someplace that around the (last) turn of the century, someone hauled a bicycle up there and rode along the summit ridge; that hardly seems possible.

We saw some footprints that seemed to indicate someone had climbed Yokum Ridge in the last few days, which seems impossible; there was no ice at all on the ridge that we could see.

It was awfully windy, of course, up on the Queen's Chair, the upper dome of the mountain, and the summit. I had one of those little zipper-pull thermometers and it registered around 30 degrees for most of the trip, and about 20 degrees on the summit. In any case, it was cold enough that the water in the Nalgene water bottle I carry outside my pack froze completely, and the water bottle inside my pack was pretty slushy.

We got to the summit a bit after 1:00; for about eight hours of some of the funnest climbing I’ve had in a while.



Looking north to Mt. Adams. The white smear that looks like a frozen river
is actually the A.G. Aiken Lava Bed.


James relaxing on the hogsback, Crater rock steaming in the background.

The two-hour descent, and we were back at the car

The drive home was pretty long, though it was a nice to be able to lay back and relax in the passenger seat. I dropped James off and got home before Heidi, and before I’d gotten the car cleaned out, it started to rain. Excellent timing! It rained pretty hard later, which felt good to hear.

It appeared to me that the snow level was extremely low. When I was up there in March two years ago, the snow was almost to the level of the cables on the upper lift. This time, the snow was so low that there were rocks exposed down on the lower area. You could just see the beginning of the bergschrund on the hogsback, I bet by May it’ll be totally impassable.

I have started taking Monkey, a monkey puppet belonging to my son, on climbs, partly for the whimsey, and partly to give Peter a bit of a part of my climbs. After I got home, I told Peter about Monkey going up to the top of Mt. Hood, and he seemed pretty interested in that. He asked me "What did Monkey see up there?" And, he took Monkey to bed with him, Cow all but forgotten.

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