Mt. Hood, OR

Elevation: 11,239 ft.

Summit Attained: 7 a.m., 05/08

I'd been out to Oregon to try Mt. Hood before, with my brother Josh in June of 2007.  After weeks of planning and training, we'd finally made it to the base of Mt. Hood with a big pile of gear and a few free days.  Two successful acclimatization hikes up the Palmer Snowfield had left us feeling confident about our prospects, but the weather had suddenly turned on the eve of our climb, and we had returned home empty handed. 

Now I was back with another big stack of gear and an even healthier set of legs (if no other good had come from our previous failure, I had been given another year to heal from my ACL reconstruction).  This time I was without my brother, however, and I wasn't sure how safe it would be to try to solo the mountain's upper reaches without any prior experience on the headwall. 

To make matters worse, the Northwest Avalanche Center had just released a forecast that local climbers were calling the most alarming set of predictions in over 20 years.  A recent rapid warming trend had destabilized the snow pack (over 20+ feet of snow still blanketed Hood's slopes,) and massive avalanches were predicted to occur throughout the Cascades over the next couple of days.  With such an ominous snow pack forecast, I decided that it would be best to attempt the peak as part of a team.

Enter Charlie and Jeff:  I was really lucky to meet these guys.  Charlie is a nice guy from Michigan who loves anything that has to do with the outdoors, and Jeff is a local climber, a veteran of Hood's icy slopes.  After a chance encounter in the parking lot of the ski resort (the easily accessible Palmer Snowfield allows Mt. Hood to offer the only year-round skiing in the continental U.S.,) we spent a few rainy hours reviewing our group snow-travel technique before splitting up for the day. 

It was still early, so I decided to explore the historic Timberline Lodge, which sits just up the hill from the ski center.  The Timberline Lodge was conceived and built during the depths of the great depression as a way of stimulating the local economy.  Situated at an elevation of 6,000 ft. on the south side of the mountain, the lodge offers visitors spectacular views of the peak and forested valleys that surround it.  As an interesting bit of trivia, the Timberline Lodge is the hotel in the famous horror film "The Shining," and an axe with "Here's Johnny!!" printed down the handle sits on display in the main lobby. 

The Timberline Lodge offers a variety of rooms, from grand suites that cost a fortune to charming Swiss-style climbers' chalets.  The chalets are tiny (everyone shares two bathrooms), but they're perfect for someone who needs nothing more than a bed and a place to sort out gear.  Since that was just what I had in mind, I rented one of the chalets and moved in. 

After I had laid out my stuff, I wandered up into the hotel dining room. There, I got a good visual representation of the amount of snow still on the ground outside.  You literally couldn’t see out of the dining room's third floor windows!  I decided right there and then that I had made a good choice by not going at it alone.

After a late night drinking wine and chatting with some of the local skiers, I hit the pillow around 12:30 A.M., and lay there thinking about what waited in the hours ahead.  The dangerous snow pack conditions weighed heavily on my psyche.  Thankfully I had very little time to dwell, barely more than an hour, before my alarm went off.  Tired but very excited, I rose, dressed quickly and made my way out of the lodge into the dark parking lot.  I stashed everything I didn't need in my car trunk, and made my way across the lot to the front of the ski lodge, where Charlie, Jeff, and several other climbers were waiting for the next inbound snow cat.  Minutes later, one of the vehicles clattered noisily around the corner, and we all climbed aboard for the ride to the top of the ski area. 

The trip up the Palmer Snowfield was interesting; the strange feeling of moving on treads, coupled with the awkward silence, made me feel like I was in some sort of armored tank heading off to fight a battle somewhere.  After about a half hour, the cat spun a 180 and stopped suddenly on a rather steep incline.  Seconds later, the driver opened the heavy steel back door, and we rose one by one and clamored out of the cramped but warm cat, and onto the cold, dark snowfield beyond the doors. 

The bitter alpine night air greeted us like a sharp kick in the face, and everyone immediately donned their headlamps and fumbled to secure their gloves and pack as fast as possible.  The other climbers in the cat were training for Timberline Mountain Guides, heading on an all-day traverse to the south, so Charlie, Jeff and I would be the first climbers to break trail toward Hood's summit that day.  After a minute or so, Jeff signaled that our team should get moving, and he turned and began ascending the slope as Charlie and I fell into a single-file formation just behind. 

We climbed without speaking for some time, with the soft crunch of the snow beneath our boots and our rhythmic breathing providing the only sounds.  As I strained to see beyond the beams of our lamps, I could just make out the enormous silhouette of Mt. Hood's crater wall high above our heads.  I was nervous, but thrilled to be finally booting it up the side of the mountain that had so often occupied my thoughts over the past year. 

After about ninety minutes of climbing, I noticed that a faint glow had begun to gather on the horizon behind us.  The light grew quickly, and we were able to turn our lamps off about fifteen minutes later, as dawn spilled over the forests below and up onto the snowfield where we stood, lighting the alien world around us in an ethereal glow. 

Mt. Hood is an active volcano, and about a thousand feet above the top of the Palmer Snowfield, we began to smell the stench of the fumaroles that dot the mountainside beneath the headwall.  The heat radiating up from inside the mountain had melted the snow around the vents, and we could see the clouds of sulphuric gas rising from the dry dirt patches.  It smelled like a bunch of angry skunks, and we climbed as fast as we could up and over the Hogsback (the Hogsback is a permanent ridge of snow that leads up to the Bergshrund, a really big crevasse that marks the upper edge of the Palmer glacier).  Shortly after crossing over the Hogsback, we ditched our trekking poles and roped up to begin the ascent of the menacing headwall. 

As we began the final push to the summit, the distant sound of snow sloughing off and crashing down the headwall in the nearby Pearly Gates chute told us that the already-unstable snow pack was beginning to warm.  The thought of a possible avalanche gave the three of us wings, and we pushed up the long and steep headwall without much pause.  The upper part of the headwall is divided into isolated chutes, and we chose the so-called Old Chute.

As it turned out, the upper section of the Old Chute was quite steep (well over fifty degrees,) and we resorted to front-pointing and tooling our way up the final yards before reaching the very narrow crater rim.  I mean narrow; cresting the rim literally involved hooking your axe over the top to find purchase somewhere out of sight on the north side of the mountain!!  The exposure was wild, but a short traverse led to a wider ridge, and not long thereafter, the three of us stood near the edge of the giant cornice that makes up the summit of Mt. Hood. 

We were all very happy to be on top, and the clear skies allowed for incredible views in all directions.  Unfortunately, the same clear skies meant that the air was warming rapidly, so after a few excited phone calls and energy bars, we turned to begin the descent.  Remembering the ice at the top of the Old Chute proper, we picked a smaller side chute that connected to the bottom part of the Old Chute.  The snow was getting softer with each passing minute, but we nevertheless reached the bottom of the headwall without incident a little over an hour after departing from the summit. 

Passing back over the Hogsback, we were met by a disturbing sight.  Dozens of climbers, some visibly ill-equipped, were just reaching the snowfield above the upper ski lift.  These people wouldn't make the summit for another two hours at least, and were really tempting fate with such a late start.  It was obvious to us that these amateurs were approaching dangerous conditions, and we made sure to warn everyone we passed about the rapidly warming snow and NAC report as we continued our descent.

Eventually, we reached the Palmer Glacier and its year-round ski runs.  Although we were sans skis, we still managed to skate our way down the last mile-and-a-half to the lodge.  There, one of Charlie's buddies met us with a case of cold beer, capping off a great climb in one of the best ways possible.