Mt. Hood Climb

Overcoming first impressions

When I first met Aaron Varney, my first impression was a bit of disgust and a lot of disappointment. Those of you who know Aaron Varney are no doubt highly confused by this, so I'll explain ... I was 6 or 7 years old, and I was told that I had a new cousin! My parents were both very excited and their excitement quickly transferred to to me. I am sure it wasn't a very long drive, most likely from Layton to Provo Utah. I don't remember very many details, but I do remember being all but ready to explode with anticipation of getting to meet my new cousin. When we finally got to the Varney's apartment, there was Aaron laying in a little ball fast asleep. It became quickly apparent that it was not going to be very interesting to play with my new cousin. Somehow, prior to meeting Aaron I had missed the detail that my new cousin was a baby! My parents assured me that he would grow up and I would be able to play with him later and I gave a nod and harbored the, "yeah like in forever from now," kind of a thought, after all, to a 7 year old it does take a full lifetime to get to be 7 years old.

I am pleased to say that Aaron has long since passed the stage of development at which he became interesting to play with. Even with a relatively large age difference for kids, we had a lot of fun together growing up when ever the families visited. As I was looking at the pictures of the climb up Mt. Hood, I got a laugh thinking about the difference between my first thoughts of Aaron and the way things are now, especially considering that he he has two kids similar ages to two of my own.

Hood Climb

I don't remember if it was my idea or Aaron's idea to climb Mt. Hood this spring, but it was one of those ideas that really didn't matter who the idea originated with, because we both quickly held the idea so strongly. To speak back to first impressions a little, the first time I saw Mt. Hood, I just about went off the road because I had my eyes fixed on the mountain rather than driving. The mountain is absolutely gorgeous. Mt. Hood was the first of the Cascades that I had ever seen. I hadn't ever seen a mountain stand so tall all by itself before. The green orchards below giving way to a snow and rock peak was absolutely breathtaking. From that moment on I have strongly considered, and still do consider living in the shadow of Mt. Hood. That moment also of course seeded the thought of, "I need to climb that thing."

People who don't climb much may think the word "need" was a bit of an overstatement and I will concede that in the most absolute sense it is. I use the word "need" in the way a person does when they say they need cloths to wear, they need three meals a day or they need a dry place to sleep. Those too are things that a person can continue their existence without, but the absence of which would beg the question of what kind of life are they living. I'm sure if I ever get to the Himalayas or even Mt. Mckinley, I will want to climb them, but would be able to contain that desire with a dose of rational about other pursuits in life that may be more fulfilling than what could become a last attempt at a mountain. Mt. Hood jumps to need status because the mountain is small enough to not be a direct Russian Roulette style gamble with one's life to take a try for it, yet the mountain is large enough to be highly satisfying. The simplest route up the mountain is straight forward enough that I felt very comfortable with it. The majority of the mountain's casualties I learned about came from what I consider highly avoidable circumstances.

As plans for the climb developed my brother, Robert (the one I climbed the Grand Teton with) and one of Aaron's friends, Mike were added to the list of people in the party. I was very excited that Rob was coming. I didn't think to invite him because he lived so far away, but it turns out that a direct flight from Salt Lake to Portland isn't too expensive these days and Rob's desire to climb Mt. Hood (and wife permission factor) was high enough to pay for the ticket. Aaron's friend Mike concerned me a little because I had never met him before and of course had never climbed with him. Aaron's description of how badly Mike wanted to get to the summit concerned me a little more. I am a very strong preacher of, "summits are nice and parking lots are mandatory" when it comes to the result of a mountain climb. Especially on big mountains there are times when one just needs to turn around. Meeting Mike relieved all of my concerns about him. Mike proved to be very level headed, highly personable and in general great to be around. He is an automatic invite to any other hikes or climbs I do. We decided that Aaron was in the best shape of any of us in the group so he was awarded the honor of carrying the rope. I felt awkward about not carrying my own rope, but between fears of slowing the group down and memories of knee pain. I was able to ease my conscience pretty quickly and enjoy that someone else was toting the rope.

The risk of ice and rock fall near the summit of Mt. Hood mandate that a prudent approach to a one day trip to the summit and back starts between midnight and 2 AM the morning of the climb. The early start allows climbers to be on and off the summit before the sun rises and starts melting things up high. As a group we decided that we would wake a midnight and try to be on the trail and climbing by one. As a safety measure a free self- issued permit is required to climb Mt. Hood. The permit requires filling out details of where you are going, what you have with you and when you expect to be back. I found it interesting that included in the checklist of things you were taking with you along with the listings for things such as ice axes, crampons, ropes, belay devices, cell phones, map etc ... was common sense. At nearly one in the morning facing a huge pitch black snowy mountain that none of us had ever climbed it made the most sense to us not to list "common sense" as an item in our possession, so we left that box blank.

Mt. Hood is a very popular climb which simplified the route finding and ascent quite a bit. In the dark pretty much all that was needed was to follow footsteps and look up the mountain for head lamps ahead of us to get the general direction of where we were headed. We did use maps and GPS's to verify that the headlamps were indeed using our intended route. As an all snow route there aren't really any switch backs on the climb up the mountain. The climb makes a pretty much straight shot from the timberline lodge to the summit. For people who want details about our route you can do a Google search for "Mt. Hood South Side Route." I think you will get about 20,000 matches to blog entries, many with a crazy level of detail, which I have no intention of providing right now. I don't want to understate or overstate the route. I think staircase is an apt description of our climbing experience on hood with the given snow conditions in as much as we were able to follow frozen footprints up the mountain. Every now and then we would break through and sink into the footprints causing for a little more effort in the climbing, but for the most part the footing was good and was mostly about the effort of making an ascent. Staircase may under describe the ascent a little in that most staircases contain between 1 flight in home or small office and 30 flights of stairs in a giant building where as the Mt. Hood climb if in stairs would be somewhere in the range of 500-600 flights of stairs depending on how large each flight was. Even though it is straight forward, it is still a lot of climbing.

By the time we didn't need our headlamps for light any more we were well above the ski lift. We were very pleased to start to see some of the view. The most spectacular feature of the morning was the shadow of Mt. Hood which seemed to stretch all the way to the ocean. If the shadow had been pointed toward Mt. Jefferson it would have come close to touching it, so I have an easy time believing the shadow was 80 miles long.

At around 9000 feet I started getting nervous that we were going too slow. We were getting a lot of light, but weren't hearing things fall yet. We picked up the pace a bit toward the summit. At around 10,000 feet we met the first people on the way down. It turned out that they had not summited, but rather had someone in their group take poorly to the altitude. We could see across what is called the Hog's Back to see that there was a very large collection of climbers gathered for the final approach to the summit. We decided to put our crampons on early so that we wouldn't need to stop when we got to the steep pitch in front of the summit. After another group going down complaining about being sick passed us, I told Rob that I didn't have rational input to offer with respect to a decision about our own turn around. Getting the crampons on and an ice axe in my hand, looking at the ridge leading to the summit left me with much less than a clear head. I wanted up and I wanted up badly. I am reasonably sure that if I saw something that I recognized as an unacceptable risk I would have had the discipline to turn around, something like vomiting and light headedness, however wasn't going to be the thing to stop me, especially in light of how quickly we would be able to get below 10,000 feet.

It turned out the route was very nice and avoided the most ominous cliffs, which would be likely to dump large amounts of rock and ice. With that said the climbers above would kick down quite a bit of ice and even a camera case at one point, so we did get good use of our helmets. We also, with the help of someone who seemed to know the mountain, found a chute, that for some reason other climbers weren't using, that saved us a lot of exposure bypassing a part of the climb know as the "cat walk". Even though the climbing was super easy we decided to rope up, because an uncontrolled fall would either put a person in a fumeral or off a holy hallelujah of a steep slope into a cliff. I took the lead of the rope, because I had logged the most time with crampons and an ice axe and had the confidence in my own ability to stop if someone went into a slide.

At the top of the steep part, it was a simple traverse to the summit, I switched the lead over to Aaron to let him be the first to the summit, as a way of thanking him for carrying the rope.

We had very clear weather and the view from the top of Mt. Hood was everything one might imagine from the bottom it might be. We could see over a hundred miles in every direction. The contrast of the green valleys and snow covered peaks was stunning. The summit itself surprised me in how pretty it was. Even though Mt. Hood is very heavily climbed when on the summit, I still felt like I was in a very privileged, special place.

Aaron lead the way down the steep part. He was a bit unsure about it at first, but got into it right away. I took the back of the rope to act as an anchor in case anyone slipped. Some people actually did use snow pickets,but they were over kill for the situation. With the snow condition I couldn't see any situation that would warrant their need. I think it may have been a mountaineering class that was simply teaching people how to put them in.

It was about 9:30 AM as we were coming down the steep slope off the summit. We had read that one wants to be off by 10AM. Indeed relative to the climb up, there was a lot of ice falling. With the exception of a couple of baseball sized rocks that went zinging down, nothing was more than what I consider an annoyance, but it did keep things interesting. We would either yell or hear climbers yell ice, and then dive into a self arrest position to hide under our helmets as the ice went down. I got hit in the backpack with a piece that I think would have hurt if it had hit me, Aaron got hit in the shoulder with a piece that he thought would have been a lot worse if it hadn't made its main impact on his strap padding. Rob got tagged in the leg and I think Mike got hit as well, but I am not sure. Again, everything was small so it was a bumps and bruises risk, not a life risk so I felt very comfortable with it. All the same I was very happy when we made it up Hog's Back and were out of falling ice. As a post note ... When I got home I found a few unaccounted for bruises on my legs when I got home, so I am sure I did get hit more frequently and harder than I had realized when climbing.

On the way down we were very pleased to find that a part of the steep part of the climb that had been a real pain coming up offered a great route for a glissade (slide) on the way down. My pants were a bit too sticky to allow sliding on my backside, but the mountain was open enough that I was able to put my pack on my chest and slide down head first on my back. I would turn around before I got going to fast and a couple times was able to maintain the slide in a seated position, otherwise I would simply resume to my back. When the glissading didn't work something tha also made the decent very nice, other than the obvious fact that it was down hill instead of up, was that the snow had gotten much softer. This made i such that our feet were taking about six inches of travel from the time they hit the snow to the time they stopped. This made the effect of having pillows on the bottoms of our boots, making what I believe is the easiest on the knees decent of a mountain I have ever had in my life.

We made it to the bottom at about 1PM for a total of 12 wonderful hours on the mountain. It was a great joy and privilege to have such a great little adventure.