Mt. Hood Summit Attempt

Apparently, Mt. Hood is the second most climbed mountain in the world, after Mt. Fuji in Japan. While I am not 100% sure this statistic is correct, I can tell you first hand, that this is an awesome mountain to summit. With 5000 feet of elevation gain and 7.5-mile round trip hike, it is not an easy mountain, but it is certainly a doable one. Another awesome fact about Mt. Hood is that dogs are allowed to hike, or even summit on the mountain.

On this beautiful hike, we learned the hard way, that it’s absolutely important to know your dog’s limits. While we have hiked longer, higher mountains and skied on snowy terrains with our pup, we hadn’t attempted an icy mountain hike. This ended up being a bad idea because Snow ended up hurting her paws only ~500 feet short of the summit.
 
Before embarking on our journey, we called a few ranger stations and Timberline Mountain Guides to assess the weather and mountain conditions. Based on their recommendations, we settled on the South Side, Hogsback approach that finished with Old Chute near the summit. Here is a link to the route: http://www.summitpost.org/south-side-old-chute-variation/265416

This image was taken by Blaine Franger and used from Mountainshop website

The night before our hike, we parked the car at the Timberline Mountain Lodge (A must see! Its an incredible hotel) and slept in the car for a few hours. We made sure that all of our gear was completely ready to go, so we didn’t have to do any busy work in the morning. Before the hike, we even made sure that the crampons were adjusted to the shoe size and could be easily clipped on in the morning.

View of Mt. Hood from Timberline Mountain Lodge. Gorgeous!

At 1:30 AM, we woke up and had a banana and a granola bar. We then put on our gear quickly and were on the trail at 2 AM. Rookie mistake, we didn’t diligently memorize the path of the hike and assumed that there would be clear markers for how to get at least half way through. We were SO wrong. Initially, we stayed way right and came face to face with a few crevasses. This scared me, since were didn’t have any crevasse gear. I decided that it was way safer to just hike next to the ski resort on Mt. Hood, which rests in the center of the South Face. After traversing right, we noticed a lot of people were hiking in the ski area boundary, which was groomed. This would have been much easier, but didn’t know if this was the correct approach to mountaineering haha…
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Anyway, we stayed outside the ski boundary and kept hauling ass. We also made really good time, and got to around 10K feet by 6 AM. The sunrise was spectacular and the views of the Cascadian Volcanos and glistening snow was incredible to say the least. We kept moving forward, feeling very strong. My recent hiking and running was coming in handy as the altitude seemed to be making little different to my pace. At about 10,500 feet, we started noticing that Snow (our dog) was sitting down at every chance she got. With the steepness increasing, she was working really hard to stay on the snow, that hadn’t yet softened from the direct sunlight. When I looked carefully at the hiking path, I started seeing red in Snow’s paw prints and my heart skipped a beat. This didn’t look good. We were near Bergschrund and didn’t want to leave her there until the summit nor did we want to push her to go any further. We had to make a choice and turn around to descend the mountain. It was a total bummer to miss out on the summit after feeling great and being fully prepared. In the future, I think we will board our dear dog.
 
Here’s the gearlist for Mt. Hood (appropriate for a late season clear weather hike):

1. Sunhat
2. Warm beanie
3. Sun glasses
4. Sun screen
5. Light hiking top
6. Fleece jacket
7. Goretex jacket
8. Hike pants + goretex pants OR softshell pants. I wore the former since I didn’t have any softshell pants. Next purchase!
9. Light glove liner (I pretty much just needed these)
10. Warm/ ski gloves
11. Hiking/ mountaineering socks – I have really thick socks from Icebreaker
12. Moutaineering boots – We both have LaSportiva Spantiks
13. Crampons

Justin and Snow, not stoked at the 3 AM departure time

Poor Snow being carried down from the mountain

Happy hiking family!

Posing with Mt. Jefferson in the distance

Reflection of Mt. Hood on the clouds below! It was warmer on the mountain than at the base!

Hope you choose to hike this beautiful mountain and have better luck than we did!