After a bummer of a Friday night — lost my ID, got a flat tire on my bike, finally found my ID in my car along with $100 in parking fines (my parking pass had expired…) — I was ready to get out of Dodge. This will be a ten-day road trip through Oregon for me, working in Portland with a trip to Ashland for a wedding in-between, and I was happy to get to start it off with Jeff, Bret, and Kate on Mt. Hood.
After some frantic last-minute packing on Saturday morning, we hopped in our cars for the four-hour drive down south. We arrived at the mountain to find the Cooper Spur road closed, necessitating an unexpected four miles of hiking with our full packs just to get to Cloud Cap, our hoped-for starting off point. We opted to sleep on the porch of the lodge (thanks, Crag Rats!), which meant that we could at least leave our tents in the car, but weighed down with skis, boots, and gear in addition to all the regular backpacking stuff, we were pretty much spent when we arrived a bit before sundown. Kate and Bret cooked up some delicious noodles, which we chased with a dessert of dried mango with Nutella, and Cloud Cap (as usual) did not disappoint with the sunset views.
I awoke a few hours later — 3am, to be exact — to the welcome sound of Bret brewing up coffee. We struggled awake and got onto the trail an hour later, making our way to the lower reaches of the Elliot glacier as the sun was peeking up.
We strapped our skis on and started skinning up. Things were really icy, and I soon learned a rough lesson on how well my skis can hold an edge on the steeps when I found myself sliding 100 meters down the hard slope, ripping my shirt and scraping my forearm up really nicely in the process. I think I was more demoralized about losing the precious altitude until I realized that I needed to patch up my arm a bit.
We then mutually decided that crampons were the better option than skis, so we strapped the sticks back on our packs and pressed on, skirting some small crevasses and then trudging up the roughly 2,000 feet to the top of the Snow Dome. Jeff earned bonus Karma for hauling the heavy rope all the way up.
At this point we figured we were a little more than 2,000 feet below the summit. It seemed so close! Bret’s ankle was giving him trouble, so he opted to wait us out while Kate, Jeff, and I ditched our skis and roped up for the more technical upper reaches. With Jeff’s route finding skills we picked our way around bergschrunds and crevasses, only once having to carefully belay each other over a slightly ignoble snow bridge.
An hour later we achieved the summit ridge, about 800 feet below the top, but found ourselves confronted with some overly technical ice climbing for which we hadn’t the proper tools, as well as a somewhat late hour in the day. So we congratulated ourselves on a job well done, took in the views of Adams, St. Helens, and Rainier, and snapped a quick “summit” photo, some 7,000 feet above our cars.
We picked our way back down to our skis and whooped our way down the now-softened Snow Dome on tired legs!
Exhausted, but delighted, we strapped our skis back to our packs and slogged back down to Cloud Cap to pick up our sleeping bags, and then stumbled the four miles back down through meadows of purple wildflowers alternating with the charred remnants of the 2006 forest fire. We devoured some leftover pizza, and headed it down to Hood River, where the gang wasted no time getting to the brewpub while I purchased caffeine and Neosporin to fix myself up a bit, and headed to Portland to meet friends just finishing the STP and have a well-deserved beer.
I’m really looking forward to coming back to Mt. Hood with Synapse in August!