Mt. Hood Timberline Trail, Oregon
Usually 41 miles. 56 miles for us, stylin'.
Gallery
I moved to Portland in the summer of 2009 without having first visited the city. I arrived by Amtrak, loaded up my bicycle bags, and pedaled off to a new neighborhood with a hip grocery store, swanky coffee shops, attractive nightlife, and scores of like-minded folks to call friends. Love is all I have for it, and it is the second place that I have left because I knew that if I didn't leave, I would be there forever. Anyway, as I crossed the Broadway Bridge that day for the first of a thousand times, I noticed the sign atop the Union Station, "Go by Train". The parallel phrase popped into my head today "Go by Foot", and I have concluded that this is my preferred method of transport. Why walk?
Well, I have taken a couple of walks since, and also since then, said goodbye to the Rose City. Before doing so, my Love and I decided to adios in style with a walk around the mountain that we had gazed at from the Willamette Valley on clear days and squinted at with our imaginations during the usual, wondrous gloom of year-round precipitation. The Timberline Trail around Mt. Hood starts and ends wherever you want it to along the loop covering the circumference of the peak. But the most common route is to start and end at the Timberline Lodge. Our trek could take no more than 3 days, as we had commitments to house sit a garden and a black lab in Portland as soon as we were off the trail. Forty one miles in 3 days? No problem!
We had originally planned to car camp near the trailhead and set off early the next morning, but the weekend crowd had snagged all available campsites. We ate burgers and fries in the alpine town of Government Camp and drove up to the trailhead at dusk. A mile in and past the wilderness boundary, we set up camp and snoozed the night away.
Waking up at the crack of dawn in a bed can be miserable. Waking up at the crack of dawn in a tent surrounded by purple lupine? That I can rise to. We started well, tackling miles across pathways of pine needle draped dirt and volcanic ash. I was happy to see the silty beginnings of the Sandy River, which makes its way 56 miles from Mt. Hood before it dumps itself into the Columbia River. There isn't a bad view in this wilderness. Besides seeing other mountains of the Cascades from a distance, there is a continual appearance of wildflowers, glacial creeks and rivers, and of course, Mt. Hood staring down at you the entire way.
It's tough to put description to a whole day of beautiful sights. We ended up in a picturesque camp space before the night was over. Meadow, Mt. Hood in full view, creek running nearby. A group of deer decided to entertain us with their presence at dusk. Nice end to the day.
The next morning, we found ourselves walking through sections of both green and burnt out forest. We caught sights of Mt. Saint Helens and Adams as we followed along the north side of Mt. Hood. A bit more snowmelt on this side, and the mosquitoes were out to heckle us. We kept on, rounding the mountain, in expectation of the only real obstacle which would confront us on the northeast section of the trail.
One of the more interesting realities of the Mt. Hood Wilderness is the rapid change in topography from year to year. It's a pretty dynamic area. Tens of feet of snow and ice cover the ground in winter, and as summer slowly arrives, the views of glaciers are combined with green and flower swept meadows. You might be hiking for miles through the Cascade Range's signature evergreen trees and then suddenly come to a screeching halt on the edge of a talus canyon hundreds of feet deep. This is an amazing wilderness and at the top of my list of favorite places on Earth.
There was a bridge that crossed the ravine below the Elliot Glacier a few years back. The way I remember the story, washouts destroyed the bridge year after year, and the Forest Service got a bit sick of rebuilding it, which I don't blame them for. They decided to 'close' the trail a few years back in that area. In other words, if you were planning to hike past that point, you'd need to figure out your own way. Some hikers installed a rope where you could let yourself down the ravine and then hike back out the other side. Pretty convenient, considering the other options would be to bushwhack below the ravine to find an area with a modest enough grade to go down and then up it, or cross Elliot Glacier above the ravine. So when we got to it, look for the rope we did. And look and look. So much looking and not any finding. It was evident that we would not be able to cross at any convenient spot and after a couple of hours of combing the ridgeline, we would be faced with the option of crossing at the glacier or figuring a way around. This is the part where I get a little annoyed at my topo and really start to understand how quickly the landscape around us can change. There's this trail on my map called the Cloud Cap Saddle, which circles below the ravine, connects with a road, and then connects with a trailhead which would hook us back up with the Timberline Trail. Not sure what to expect at the foot of the glacier, we backtracked to this trail only to find that it did not exist, likely leveled in a washout a couple years back. Studying the grades on the map, I concluded that we could still bushwack the path of the trail and emerge out the other side. I was wrong, and a couple miles down into the ravine, I looked up and concluded that the walls above of us would be too steep to climb our way out. Bummer. It was at this time in the mid-afternoon that we enacted the turnaround. Bushwack out the way we came, we would need to knock down as many miles as we could before dusk in order to ensure that our final day would not be too hellish in terms of distance.
On the way back that evening, we encountered a group of Buddhist monks who had walked from Mt. Adams that week, clothed in orange robes and Vibram five-fingers. We chatted about our predicament locating the rope. One of them had found it earlier that day and climbed the way out of the ravine. Good for them, and good to hear that it existed. But in my mind, I had already resolved to return the way we had come and finish the entirety of this trail some other day. With night just around the corner we would ultimately pitch our tent in Elk Cove, 26 miles out from Timberline Lodge, where we had begun.
The next morning, both our feet hardly fit in our shoes. We packed and prepped mentally for an exhausting final day. We passed by the same landscape features and bid them farewell until next time. Something that we would have missed had we not backtracked that day would be the view of Mt. Saint Helens, Mt. Adams, and Mt. Rainier in all their glories. A haze on the way in had stifled views of Rainier, and it was nice to see all the volcanoes looking as daunting as ever on our shared horizon. We stopped and rested near a shaded creek emptying into the Sandy River, and then, as we hiked up a steady string of switchbacks, Melody's body said 'no' and she bonked. Oh, that wonderful wall where the body demands rest and nutrition in such a way as there is no ignoring it. Only one thing to do here: water, snacks, and nap time!
We rested a bit, and a few miles later, a good-looking PCT thru-hiker, hailing from Pocatello, offered Melody a sugar-frosted Pop Tart. The food we had packed had not been appealing to her, but the Pop Tart, oh the Pop Tart from our handsome, bearded friend, was exactly what she needed. Strangers can be kind. From that point on, we hiked in high spirits. I misread the map at a later point and thought we had 2 dauntingly steep canyons to hike through on the way back, but it turned out to be one. Good news, and we finished the hike strong, feet blistered, dirt saturated, hungry for pizza and ice cream, and pretty elated at the day we had managed to pull off. It's one thing to hike 26 miles or more in a day (any thru-hiker would do this routinely), but the elevation gains and losses we encountered were very challenging in combination with the mileage. Stoked to be returning to Portland that night, proud of ourselves, and now ready to say goodbye to the city we had come to know and love.
There is this one part of the Timberline Trail I will never forget. I won't say where it is exactly because you just know it when you get there, or if you don't, then there is at least a spot on the trail that makes you feel the same way. My spot is along a system of creeks which need to be forded to continue, and there is probably more river rock on this part of the trail than any other I observed. Fully exposed, just turn around and look up. See waterfalls tumble from high ledges in the distance, moss and trees growing out of the sides of cliffs, evergreens in ranks atop every ridge below timberline, and the mountain looking down on all of it like some wise being. If there is some place to go after death, I hope it is designed with this as the blueprint.
So all types of beauty warrant a bit of an exchange between you and the wilderness. Sure, you can start at a trailhead, lope around for a bit, and then head home at the end of the day to a warm shower and hot food, which is admittedly one of my favorite ways to do things. You can build a road to something beautiful and share your experience with hundreds of other visitors. You can leave all roads and trails behind and probably find some real solitude bushwhacking across some challenging terrain. In the end, though, I usually opt for a few days out on a man-made trail. Enough of a luxury to show me which way to go, but hopefully not crowded enough to take away from the experience. The more trails I walk, the more I am grateful for the freedom to walk them. The world is not so populated that all wild places are encroached upon, but many of us are lucky enough that we can choose to go out and see these landscapes, do it relatively safely and comfortably, and ultimately return to the comforts of civilization. I cannot quite nail down why it's important to backpack. Sure, see a beautiful place, get out of the city and get some solitude, get some exercise while you're at it. But there is not just one thing that sticks out to me as a good reason to keep doing this.. maybe it's the wandering. There's something about searching, sometimes finding, sometimes turning around when the path is wrong. That's where the stories come from, and that's where I get just a bit closer to whatever is drawing me there.
I have had too many interests. So many, maybe to the degree that I am not enough of an expert on anything. In part, the older I become, the more focused I become; the other side of this is that I am figuring out the difference between things that are enjoyable and things that make me feel alive. When it comes down to it, for some quiet, indefinable reason, there is nothing quite like throwing on a pack and taking a walk.
-Grasshopper
Usually 41 miles. 56 miles for us, stylin'.
Gallery
I moved to Portland in the summer of 2009 without having first visited the city. I arrived by Amtrak, loaded up my bicycle bags, and pedaled off to a new neighborhood with a hip grocery store, swanky coffee shops, attractive nightlife, and scores of like-minded folks to call friends. Love is all I have for it, and it is the second place that I have left because I knew that if I didn't leave, I would be there forever. Anyway, as I crossed the Broadway Bridge that day for the first of a thousand times, I noticed the sign atop the Union Station, "Go by Train". The parallel phrase popped into my head today "Go by Foot", and I have concluded that this is my preferred method of transport. Why walk?
Well, I have taken a couple of walks since, and also since then, said goodbye to the Rose City. Before doing so, my Love and I decided to adios in style with a walk around the mountain that we had gazed at from the Willamette Valley on clear days and squinted at with our imaginations during the usual, wondrous gloom of year-round precipitation. The Timberline Trail around Mt. Hood starts and ends wherever you want it to along the loop covering the circumference of the peak. But the most common route is to start and end at the Timberline Lodge. Our trek could take no more than 3 days, as we had commitments to house sit a garden and a black lab in Portland as soon as we were off the trail. Forty one miles in 3 days? No problem!
We had originally planned to car camp near the trailhead and set off early the next morning, but the weekend crowd had snagged all available campsites. We ate burgers and fries in the alpine town of Government Camp and drove up to the trailhead at dusk. A mile in and past the wilderness boundary, we set up camp and snoozed the night away.
It's tough to put description to a whole day of beautiful sights. We ended up in a picturesque camp space before the night was over. Meadow, Mt. Hood in full view, creek running nearby. A group of deer decided to entertain us with their presence at dusk. Nice end to the day.
The next morning, we found ourselves walking through sections of both green and burnt out forest. We caught sights of Mt. Saint Helens and Adams as we followed along the north side of Mt. Hood. A bit more snowmelt on this side, and the mosquitoes were out to heckle us. We kept on, rounding the mountain, in expectation of the only real obstacle which would confront us on the northeast section of the trail.
One of the more interesting realities of the Mt. Hood Wilderness is the rapid change in topography from year to year. It's a pretty dynamic area. Tens of feet of snow and ice cover the ground in winter, and as summer slowly arrives, the views of glaciers are combined with green and flower swept meadows. You might be hiking for miles through the Cascade Range's signature evergreen trees and then suddenly come to a screeching halt on the edge of a talus canyon hundreds of feet deep. This is an amazing wilderness and at the top of my list of favorite places on Earth.
There was a bridge that crossed the ravine below the Elliot Glacier a few years back. The way I remember the story, washouts destroyed the bridge year after year, and the Forest Service got a bit sick of rebuilding it, which I don't blame them for. They decided to 'close' the trail a few years back in that area. In other words, if you were planning to hike past that point, you'd need to figure out your own way. Some hikers installed a rope where you could let yourself down the ravine and then hike back out the other side. Pretty convenient, considering the other options would be to bushwhack below the ravine to find an area with a modest enough grade to go down and then up it, or cross Elliot Glacier above the ravine. So when we got to it, look for the rope we did. And look and look. So much looking and not any finding. It was evident that we would not be able to cross at any convenient spot and after a couple of hours of combing the ridgeline, we would be faced with the option of crossing at the glacier or figuring a way around. This is the part where I get a little annoyed at my topo and really start to understand how quickly the landscape around us can change. There's this trail on my map called the Cloud Cap Saddle, which circles below the ravine, connects with a road, and then connects with a trailhead which would hook us back up with the Timberline Trail. Not sure what to expect at the foot of the glacier, we backtracked to this trail only to find that it did not exist, likely leveled in a washout a couple years back. Studying the grades on the map, I concluded that we could still bushwack the path of the trail and emerge out the other side. I was wrong, and a couple miles down into the ravine, I looked up and concluded that the walls above of us would be too steep to climb our way out. Bummer. It was at this time in the mid-afternoon that we enacted the turnaround. Bushwack out the way we came, we would need to knock down as many miles as we could before dusk in order to ensure that our final day would not be too hellish in terms of distance.
On the way back that evening, we encountered a group of Buddhist monks who had walked from Mt. Adams that week, clothed in orange robes and Vibram five-fingers. We chatted about our predicament locating the rope. One of them had found it earlier that day and climbed the way out of the ravine. Good for them, and good to hear that it existed. But in my mind, I had already resolved to return the way we had come and finish the entirety of this trail some other day. With night just around the corner we would ultimately pitch our tent in Elk Cove, 26 miles out from Timberline Lodge, where we had begun.
The next morning, both our feet hardly fit in our shoes. We packed and prepped mentally for an exhausting final day. We passed by the same landscape features and bid them farewell until next time. Something that we would have missed had we not backtracked that day would be the view of Mt. Saint Helens, Mt. Adams, and Mt. Rainier in all their glories. A haze on the way in had stifled views of Rainier, and it was nice to see all the volcanoes looking as daunting as ever on our shared horizon. We stopped and rested near a shaded creek emptying into the Sandy River, and then, as we hiked up a steady string of switchbacks, Melody's body said 'no' and she bonked. Oh, that wonderful wall where the body demands rest and nutrition in such a way as there is no ignoring it. Only one thing to do here: water, snacks, and nap time!
We rested a bit, and a few miles later, a good-looking PCT thru-hiker, hailing from Pocatello, offered Melody a sugar-frosted Pop Tart. The food we had packed had not been appealing to her, but the Pop Tart, oh the Pop Tart from our handsome, bearded friend, was exactly what she needed. Strangers can be kind. From that point on, we hiked in high spirits. I misread the map at a later point and thought we had 2 dauntingly steep canyons to hike through on the way back, but it turned out to be one. Good news, and we finished the hike strong, feet blistered, dirt saturated, hungry for pizza and ice cream, and pretty elated at the day we had managed to pull off. It's one thing to hike 26 miles or more in a day (any thru-hiker would do this routinely), but the elevation gains and losses we encountered were very challenging in combination with the mileage. Stoked to be returning to Portland that night, proud of ourselves, and now ready to say goodbye to the city we had come to know and love.
There is this one part of the Timberline Trail I will never forget. I won't say where it is exactly because you just know it when you get there, or if you don't, then there is at least a spot on the trail that makes you feel the same way. My spot is along a system of creeks which need to be forded to continue, and there is probably more river rock on this part of the trail than any other I observed. Fully exposed, just turn around and look up. See waterfalls tumble from high ledges in the distance, moss and trees growing out of the sides of cliffs, evergreens in ranks atop every ridge below timberline, and the mountain looking down on all of it like some wise being. If there is some place to go after death, I hope it is designed with this as the blueprint.
So all types of beauty warrant a bit of an exchange between you and the wilderness. Sure, you can start at a trailhead, lope around for a bit, and then head home at the end of the day to a warm shower and hot food, which is admittedly one of my favorite ways to do things. You can build a road to something beautiful and share your experience with hundreds of other visitors. You can leave all roads and trails behind and probably find some real solitude bushwhacking across some challenging terrain. In the end, though, I usually opt for a few days out on a man-made trail. Enough of a luxury to show me which way to go, but hopefully not crowded enough to take away from the experience. The more trails I walk, the more I am grateful for the freedom to walk them. The world is not so populated that all wild places are encroached upon, but many of us are lucky enough that we can choose to go out and see these landscapes, do it relatively safely and comfortably, and ultimately return to the comforts of civilization. I cannot quite nail down why it's important to backpack. Sure, see a beautiful place, get out of the city and get some solitude, get some exercise while you're at it. But there is not just one thing that sticks out to me as a good reason to keep doing this.. maybe it's the wandering. There's something about searching, sometimes finding, sometimes turning around when the path is wrong. That's where the stories come from, and that's where I get just a bit closer to whatever is drawing me there.-Grasshopper
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