Why had I been so scared? Was I just lucky? The weather was good, although calling it cold would be more accurate, but this kept rocks in place instead of hurtling down towards my head. I was already at the top by 9am, which meant just under eight hours of moving time from when we started..
When I was 39, I started casting about desperately for something that made sense as a mid-life crisis. I had no interest in sports cars. I already owned a motorcycle and rode it less than it deserved. The idea of exchanging my wife for a younger, blonder woman felt weird and cliché. There had to be some way to prove I still had it, that I was still a man in the prime of life. That I wasn't one foot in the grave.
At this point we'd already lived in Portland
for 15 years. Living somewhere can be funny. When we go on vacation, I
do my research, I prepare. I'm ready with the agenda, packed full of the
quest for things, foods and experiences that make a location unique.
But when you live somewhere, you can always tell yourself you'll have time to
get to those things later. I have lists full of local color I want to investigate. But sometimes things stay on those lists. For years. The lists just lengthen and languish. Which is how I found myself staring at
The Mountain. Mount Hood. Wy'east. A stratovolcano visible from just
about any hill in town on a clear day. 11,249 feet of pointy white
triangle. When I was a kid, my favorite book was The Hobbit. There was a
Lonely Mountain in the book called Erebor. An unpleasant red dragon
made its home there. When we moved to Portland from Chicago, I saw the
Mountain for the first time and it reminded me of nothing more than
Erebor. It still does.
I decided I was going to climb it. I
called my friend Petra (Greek for stone) since I knew she was deeply in
love with being outdoors and specifically with mountaineering. She'd
been posting summit photos with hyperbolic excitement for nearly as long
as I'd known her. We met up to have a drink at the Radio Room on
Alberta and discuss how feasible this plan could be. I had a pilsner. It
was the first disappointment of the evening.
Mount Hood has a climbing season. During the winter the weather is too unpredictable and usually too chilly to attempt anything on the upper mountain. Clouds can appear quickly creating a disorienting whiteout condition. By midsummer, the sun has melted a lot of the rime ice near the peak. This is the ice that keeps all the rocks in place. I've been miles away on the mountain during the summer and heard these kinds of rocks fall. Some are the size of cars. In the autumn, there often isn't enough snow left to make the ramp that connects Crater Rock, a 550 foot tall lava dome near the top, to the actual summit via an inverted arch called the Hogsback. This will be relevant later. Which leaves springtime, when a traditional winter's snow has covered up the otherwise exposed rock, but there is enough sun to make conditions survivable for the average summit tourist.
Petra informed me that I probably couldn't make the climb. I hadn't done much hiking, I had zero experience mountaineering. She'd attempt it with me anyways, but made me a bullet list of local mountains to practice on first. They included small but steep hikes like Dog Mountain and Kings Mountain, as well as some longer more endurance-heavy trails like Table Mountain and Mount Defiance.
I bought some hiking boots. I started going out every week. I began building up my kit, hiking with my wife, friends, co-workers, family, anyone I could sweet talk, cajole or bully into accompanying me. When no one else wanted to come, I would go alone. But every week I was outside, getting muddy, getting dusty, getting poison oak. On a trip to the White River Canyon near Timberline Lodge, Petra taught me how to self-arrest with an ice axe, how to put on crampons when my fingers were cold. I started keeping a spreadsheet, tracking distance, elevation, the quotient of the two. During summers my kids came along. This was not voluntary.
The following year, in May, I talked my friend Joe into making an attempt. He had summited
several times in the past. I was pretty sure I was ready. I picked him
up at 11:30pm and we headed up the mountain with our gear, mine rented.
It's common to start climbing very early. Ideally you are up to the top
and down before the sun warms the south face of the mountain enough to
start dropping the big chunks of ice and stone.
There is a high elevation ski resort called Timberline Lodge on the south side of the mountain. They say it has the longest ski season of any lift in North America, and it is from this resort area that most attempts to summit are made. We pulled into the Timberline Lodge parking lot. 18 degrees Fahrenheit. A little windy. Certainly cold enough. I had hardly slept in my anticipation and excitement. Timberline regularly grooms a Climbers' Trail to the east of the ski slopes. We started up the Climbers' Trail where we could see the Silcox Hut. This is a cool wooden cabin about a mile uphill from Timberline Lodge, maybe 1000 feet of elevation gain. Every time I pass, I try the door, but I've never seen it open. The wind was right in my teeth and I closed my eyes, pretending I was sleeping while walking up the reasonably steep and slippery snow. This sleephiking became a common enough coping mechanism each time I attempted this trail. I also started counting my steps, hoping to push myself to higher numbers before having to stop and take a breather. This was only moderately successful in distracting myself. I started to make out shapes in the dark: tiny ridges, flat spots, little snowbanks. These were my immediate goals, each a battle unto itself. Just get to that one and we can re-assess. I remember doing this with mountains while driving home from college. Just get to that next one and we'll see. It was about this time Joe started having trouble with his boots. They had been stored upstairs in his house during the 2021 "heat dome" that set record high temperatures three days running. The heat had some sort of glue-melting effect on his shoes and they were starting to flap. The outer waterproof layers were separating from the foamy insulating middle layers and each step was becoming progressively more floppy. This would have been comical except we had just paid for a permit, driven an hour and a half to go walking up a steep hill in sub-freezing weather with rented gear. It was not a tough call to turn around. I remember getting home just as the sky began to lighten.
By the following
January, we had a warm weather window. I had purchased my own helmet and
the longest ice axe I had ever seen since none of the rental places
carried one tall enough to suit me. The hospital where I worked was on
strike so I had lots of time to get outside and enjoy the unseasonable
warmth. A party from a local hikers' group was making a Hood attempt and I
jumped at the chance. I rarely have luck getting mountaineers to
carpool. I assumed outdoor folks that talk about their Leave No Trace
principles would be more eager to reduce the amount of cars on the road.
I think now that we all drive separately so we can turn back or continue on
as we want, not depending on partners. This is both good and bad because
you can bail early without feeling bad about messing up someone else's
shot, but this allows you enough rope to hang yourself if you choose to
go on without your partner. Regardless, I joined this group, drove
myself to the mountain and sleephiked for several slow hours before
sunrise. I passed the Silcox Hut and the Palmer snowfield . At the top
of the Palmer Lift, there is a little snowbank created by the passing
Snowcats. This is the spot where everyone can be found lining up to change
gear. Some folks drop skis here, others carry them higher to the Devil's
Kitchen. Many of the climbers stopped here to put on their crampons. By
this point, I had paused often enough to catch my breath that my group had gone forward without noticing I wasn't there. There were
plenty of people around, so the path upward was clear, but there was no
one I recognized. I was already able to smell the sulphurous stink of the fumaroles from the
parking lot, but as I continued higher, I began to approach their origin. The Devil's
Kitchen is a flat section of the mountain where people often ditch their
low elevation gear in preparation for the push up to the summit. Many
skis stick straight up out of the snow, like a strange, brightly colored
forest. It had taken me almost 8 hours to climb this far, but since we
had started at 4am, it was now nearly noon and the sun's warmth was
beginning to thaw the south face of the mountain. I climbed up past the
shoulder of Crater Rock and started my ascent of the Hogsback. Due to
the warm weather, I was being pelted with ice from the hikers above and
ahead of me. I was plunging my ice axe into the slope when a chunk of
ice the size of a softball hit me in the hand. I lashed my pack to the
axe and got out something to eat. I felt like I was closer to standing
against the slope than sitting. The hiker ahead of me decided he had
seen enough and began heading down. I felt sick knowing that if I turned
around and gave up on my summit dream this trip, the next time I would
have to hike that whole 8 hours all over again. I weighed my lust for
completing the goal versus the factors against me. I was functionally
alone, unprepared physically, lacking correct equipment, exhausted, on a
steeper slope than I'd ever climbed and ice was continuing to rain down
around me.
Later that year, in May, we went
up again. I had since summited nearby Mount Saint Helens via the Worm
Trails (winter) route and discovered the joys of glissading. Basically,
this is sliding on your butt down a steep snowy slope, using an ice axe
as a primitive rudder held at your side. You don't want to do this with
crampons on, because if they catch on some snow, you'll likely destroy
some part of your leg as your body pivots around it at high speeds. This
is also an inopportune time to bounce gear out of your pack as you'll
need to climb back up the slope to retrieve it, sometimes for miles.
I remembered with annoyance and not a small amount of shame, the
problem of being slower than the other people on the climb. When hiking
with my children, I'm always the one pushing others forward. When I hike
with people from work, it feels the same. Hiking with people who want
to hike and do it regularly is different. They're faster, they
don't seem to mind the oxygen deprivation that comes with altitude and I
secretly think they require less snacks. So when the hike leader
announced that the weather was too cold to start, and would start at 4AM
instead of 1AM, I headed out and up anyways. I hated the idea of being
left behind and assumed my party would catch up with me later. I
sleephiked through another starry pre-dawn in bitter cold until I found
myself at the Silcox Hut. There appeared to be no one else anywhere near
me as I huddled in the lee of the building. A snowcat came and went as
I shivered, crouched against the rugged wooden and stone wall. It began to dawn
on my sleep-deprived, frozen brain that I was off-track. The Climbers'
Trail was well east of the Silcox Hut. Looking that direction, I saw the
tell-tale headlamps of other climbers, so I cut across the frozen
and re-frozen mountainside till I was back on the trail, where I miraculously met up
with my group. By the time we got to the top of the Palmer snowfield,
everyone was feeling the cold. One person had injured their leg and I
heard my group leader over someone's radio, calling it quits. I wasn't
that sad to head home.
At some point, my sense of disgust
at not having completed my goal began to eclipse my sense of danger.
Every drive to the east pushed the mountain into my face until it felt
adversarial, like maybe I would never summit, like I should probably
give up. Maybe it wasn't a realistic goal, or even a good idea. Doubts
crept in. Was it safe? Did I enjoy my attempts? Why was I doing this?
Who was I trying to impress with this? Every summer, autumn and winter
between attempts became a cycle of these questions.
Last
July I dragged my eldest daughter, Anna, along for a summit attempt on
Mount Adams. It was a two day affair, with an overnight at 9300 feet.
This was a very difficult trek for me; the first day involved choosing a
trail through a wilderness while climbing 3000 feet up with 40 pounds
of backpacking gear. Day 2 was not much easier. I'd left most of my
camping gear at our overnight spot, but had considerable difficulty
persuading a recalcitrant teenager to manage microgoals, one snowbank at
a time up the unpleasantly steep slope to the first false summit.
Coming over Piker's Peak and seeing the valley we still had to cross
just to start climbing the real summit felt crushing. This was a
valuable lesson in letting false summits get into my head. It would come
in handy the following April when my daughter and I summited Mount
Saint Helens. For much of the climb, the highest point we could see
wasn't actually the top, but rather a ridge standing out between me and
the true summit. Often the only way to realize this was to keep
climbing. Only once we could see 360 degrees around and down, we would know
we were at the top.
Last December Anna and I made an
attempt to climb up to Crater Rock. By this point she had already been
up Mount Adams and had a little experience with crampons and an ice axe.
We started late, around 6:30am. Our group went on ahead of us since we
were slower getting our gear together. Fortunately it was a beautiful
day and we weren't planning anything too dangerous, so being on our own
was safe enough. We made it up as far as the Triangle Moraine, a mess of
rocks and ice pushed by a glacier into the shape of a triangle. This
felt like a pretty good spot to stop as the sulphur from the vents was
making both of us a little nauseous.
Late this April, a
group was planning to make another Hood summit attempt. I checked in
with the organizer and watched the weather. It looked like a few days of snow followed by clear days which would allow the fresh snow to
thaw and re-freeze a couple times into something we could climb without
snowshoes or high risk of avalanches. It was looking cold, around 8
degrees below zero after windchill. This time felt different to me. Like
I was going to succeed or quit altogether. I felt like my goal had
become an obsession. It was negatively impacting the way I looked at the
future. A pattern of warmer winters, and less snowfall felt like a
personal attack. I thought, maybe past winter conditions made this easier, which was why I couldn't do it now. Now I think that a summit is usually a combination of good weather, good preparation, perseverance and a
modicum of luck. Though I'm not a big believer in luck, we still hold
our breath in tunnels, knock on wood when someone tries to jinx us, we
kiss our fingertips and touch them to the dash when we run a yellow
light. There is a rock on the shoulder of Highway 26 we like to call
Silent Rock. As you pass by, everyone stops talking, I turn off the
stereo, we all play the quiet game as we pass. This is our totem, our
charm, our gatekeeper to good luck on the mountain. I've driven by
enough now to know when I'm approaching the Rock, even in the dead of
night. This trip was no different, mute the stereo, keep my thoughts
focused on positive outcomes and keep on driving. I arrived by 12:15am, a
little early, to give me more time to gear up. My throat was just
starting to hurt from a cold my daughter had brought home that would be with
me for the next several weeks. I wandered over to the Climbers' Cave to
try and locate the rest of the group and fill out a next of kin form
that many big peaks have at the trailhead. I found the folks I had
planned to travel with, and a couple that I had been up mountains with
before. This was reassuring to me, since I figured I would keep up with
them and have a little safety in numbers. I went back to the car to
finish gearing up, opened my hand warmers and headed for the snow ramp
out of the parking lot that led up to the Climbers' Trail.
There were lots of us heading up so spirits were high. The wind was
calmer at this lower elevation, but the sulphur aroma was already being
carried down from higher up. Many of the skiers were already skinning up; the sound of their ski crampons reminded me of Jacob Marley's
chains from A Christmas Carol. Shapes loomed in the darkness, enormous
snowbanks that I failed to recognize from previous trips. After a mile, I
saw the Silcox Hut off on our left. This was my first major landmark. I
didn't feel too bad about it. I was still with my group, my fingers
were cold, but they were always cold on the mountain. The hand warmers
did not appear to be doing much. We were making good progress. We
continued upward, aiming for the top of the Palmer snowfield. This would
be another mile and change and was slightly steeper, though still on
the groomed Climbers' Trail. This had become my least favorite part
of the trail. Every time was difficult. I sleephiked for awhile,
counted my footsteps to try and focus on something other than how tired I
was, how cold my fingers were, how my toes felt like blocks of wood
inside my insulated boots. I reassured myself that sunrise had to come
eventually. For the first time, I was starting to feel really nauseous
from the stench of the sulphur vents above. I had to take more frequent
breaks to keep from throwing up. I started to question whether my
slowness was lazy muscles, poor training or actual elevation sickness. I
hadn't really experienced the associated cough and the nausea on
previous mountains, but I was feeling it this time.
At the top of the Palmer Lift, many of the climbers had stopped to put
on their crampons. Many more decided they had enough of the cold weather
and were turning around. I caught up with my group again to see who was
moving forward. Above this, the Climbers' Trail disappears and the
trail becomes more laissez-faire. You sort of aim your nose towards the
summit and keep pushing. I followed my own imaginary switchbacks as the
slope continued to increase. It was still fully dark and every time I
pulled off my gloves to fix my balaclava or check the time, my fingers
threatened to freeze. My water line had already frozen, my sports drink
bottle was mostly crystals and my toes were completely numb. I staggered
over to a relatively flat snow plateau and tried desperately to get
some feeling back into my fingers. They were very cold and despite being
numb, very painful.
This was easily the worst part of the
climb. Every mountain holds some sort of panic for me, a moment where I
have to decide whether to give up. I know that if I do give up and go
home, the next time I'll have to re-earn those terrible miles all over
again. In the past, these freak-outs included huddling on the leeward
side of the Silcox Hut by myself or icefall on the Hogsback or the
struggle of encouraging someone up the mountain when they'd already
given up on themselves. On the hardest part of Mt Adams, I once glued my jaws together with some frozen gummy bears. This time it turned out to be moderate
frostbite. I was shivering so hard I could barely eat. I had nothing to
drink that wasn't frozen so I was licking crystals out of the neck of a
gatorade bottle. Once again, I was at a critical juncture. Could I
stomach turning around and possibly giving up on my goal? Could I dig
deep and summon the courage to go forward? I could not. I gave up. I
prayed to God for strength. As my frozen tortilla wrap started to settle
my stomach, I started to feel a little warmer. My panic began to
subside. To the east, the sky began to lighten. I felt like I'd been
taken apart and reassembled. I thought of the climbers that gave up
because of the cold. I felt what they felt. I thought about previous
attempts and how sad I was each time, knowing I would have to do that
stupid Palmer mile again. I wasn't ready to give up.
By
sunrise I was sheltered by the shade of the Steel Cliffs, the lower wall
on the east side of Mount Hood's crater. This was the steepest section
so far. This led me upwards to the Devil's Kitchen. There was a whole
mess of folk swapping out gear, more people dropping off skis to lighten
the load for the last couple of hours of climbing. I stashed my
trekking poles and microspikes. From here on, it was going to be the ice
axe and ice tool, a shorter curved version of an ice axe. I followed
the boot pack up and around the east side of Crater Rock. This part felt
the most dangerous since the path was wide enough for one, but there were a
lot of people moving in both directions trying to use it. A misstep
could mean sliding down into a sulphur vent.
A couple
climbers who had summited the day before had shared that once we were
beyond Crater Rock, instead of the Hogsback, we should be using the
melted-out dirt patch called the Hot Rocks to ascend towards the chutes
leading to the summit. This are was positively socked in with sulphur
fumes, but the dirt was soft and the trail used switchbacks, which felt
cushy compared to what I had climbed so far that day. From above the Hot
Rocks I could look up the side of the crater and see the possible
routes to the top. Most people were moving towards the 1'o'clock Chute,
which I can only assume is named for its being a little to the right of
due north when facing the mountain from Crater Rock. This was about as
high as I had gotten in a previous attempt and I started questioning
what made the previous time seem so tough. Why had I been so scared?
This didn't look that tough, plenty of people were going at it. I
anchored my pack to the slope with my ice axe and unlashed the ice tool
from its loop. This might have been what I was missing the previous
time; some form of spike for every limb. Even though I knew the slope
wasn't more than 40 or 50 degrees, it was steep enough that I felt like I
was crawling almost straight up. This might have been more intimidating
if I were alone, which was in fact the case, since I had again lost my
climbing group. But there were other climbers all over the place. It
looked like a regular conga line. On my way up, another climber offered
to move out of my way. I was also intent on going slow so I told her it
would be more fun if we went up together, and just like that, we were
friends. She introduced me to other members of her group and we all
yelled greetings to each other, clinging like flies on a wall. Gradually
we got accustomed to the falling ice from traffic above us and
established a pragmatic right-of-way for people coming down next to us
as we ascended. The strange puffy walls of rime ice rose around us as
the chutes narrowed. We were feet from top. I felt the first rays of
sunlight touch my face as I poked my head out of the chute and scrambled
to get out of the way of people below and behind me. From here I could
see the true summit across a catwalk. There were about 15 other climbers
on what looked to be a broad flat spot. In my limited experience,
summits tend to be almost flat on top, not pointy like they appear from a
distance. We decided to hang out a few minutes before crossing over to
the true summit, mostly out of an abundance of caution, as I remembered
the threatening cornices all around the cone of Saint Helens. My new
friends were in a climbing group from Seattle and since it was one
member's birthday, they pulled plates, cupcakes, champagne, waffles and a
tiny bottle of syrup out of their packs, all of which they offered to
share with me. I had heard of summit beers before, but couldn't imagine
they would help my sense of balance on a precarious descent.
Nevertheless, I wasn't going to say no to a waffle on the summit of
Mount Hood. 
After that it got surreal. I had spent four
years chasing this idea and here I was. This was big, as important as
college graduation to me. Maybe more. Certainly more intentional. I'd
re-tooled my whole life around achieving this. Every week the getting up
and going out. The gear. The weird start times. The pestering people.
All of it had changed me. My experience of God through the magnitude of a
mountain, through the detail in a groundcover plant. My understanding
of my own frailty. Learning to call the flowers and the trees by their
names. Looking for my own. I'd come to an understanding that every
experience has a price. I took my kids sledding this last winter. On our
last run down the hill, we had a pretty epic crash. I landed on my neck
as two of my daughters rolled over me. A funny crunching sound was all I
heard, but on the way up the hill my eldest asked why I kept saying
"Awesome". I had done something crazy and I had walked away. My neck was
sore for a week, but I was fine with it. The blisters. The sunburns.
The dehydration. The bike crashes. The chiropractic visits. All of these
were prices I was willing to pay when I came down off a mountain, wrung
out and clean. Ready to be made over again.
