August 7 marked our ninth wedding anniversary! According to Google, “pottery” is the traditional ninth anniversary gift (or, the more modern option: “leather”). Instead of those fine goods, I suggested we go on a 40-ish mile backpacking trip around Mount Hood. It says a lot about Eric’s love for me that he quickly agreed and even planned out the whole thing!
The Timberline Trail has been on my bucket list since we moved to Portland. It’s a 40-something mile trail circumventing Mount Hood, with around 9000 feet of elevation gain (and approximately 1 million river crossings). From my research, it appears most folks take four 10-ish mile days to do the whole trail, but we didn’t quite have time for that. And a whole lot of people treat the trail as a long run and do all 40 miles in one day. We are not crazy enough for that.
So we opted to leave Portland on Friday afternoon, head to the Cloud Cap trailhead, start our counterclockwise hike with a few miles before sunset, and do the bulk of the miles on Saturday and Sunday.
In continuation of the weirdest, coldest, wettest summer we’ve experienced since moving to Oregon, the weather didn’t quite cooperate. We knew there was a chance of rain for the weekend, but we figured it might be more of a drizzle/fog situation, which we’re pretty comfortable with after years of hiking in Oregon. And since we didn’t have another free weekend in the mix for a while, we decided to just got for it. We were checking the weather all week, and by Friday afternoon, the forecast was calling for thunderstorms in the central Oregon Cascades, which is south of Mount Hood, so we thought we would be fine.
We were very wrong.
We started hiking around 5 pm, and before we were even one mile in, it was thunderstorming. We laughed about our luck, took cover under some trees, and waited out the storm. Once it passed, we kept going. And wouldn’t you know it, before we hit 2 miles, another thunderstorm rolled in. With hail! And another. And another.
We started a fun pattern of waiting out the lightning under some tree cover, and then making it as far as we could before the next storm hit. We had a few rounds of backtracking down the trail to find a place to hide. Thunderstorm #6 was huge, and it rolled in just as we were crossing yet another river. I should tell you that I have a little bit of what you might call, “water fright”, where I easily picture myself falling into a raging mountain river and flying down a waterfall into a pile of boulders at the bottom. So crossing rivers is not a super quick process for me. I spend several minutes scoping out the best route, then looking for something better, and then finally working up the courage to walk across the rocks/logs/water. Luckily, I have a very patient and wonderful husband who doesn’t get too frustrated with this fun slowpoke process.
But when that thunderstorm hit, I literally ran across the river. The thunder and lightning were so close! We had to take shelter under a small tree and hide while thunder rumbled and lightning crashed all around us. We waited for at least 45 minutes, watching it get darker and darker as the rain continued to pour.
Now, we had picked out a few different campsite options, but we had to make it around 6 miles on Friday night to get to the closest one. At this point, we were hunkered down about 1/2 mile from the closest camping area, and it didn’t seem like this storm was calming down at all. We figured we needed to just make a run for it, so we strapped on our headlamps and booked it. The rain was pouring, but we started running as quickly as we could with our hiking packs (which is probably not very fast at all). Eric was ahead of me, and I could barely hear him over the sound of the rain, but he yelled my name and pointed to the ridge behind us. And on top of the ridge was a single tree, glowing orange with flames.
Seeing a tree on fire will really get your heart pumping and your legs moving! Within a few minutes, we reached the campsite. I was very pleased to see that we weren’t the only idiots out in this storm, although the other folks at the campsite didn’t seem quite as flustered as these fools. We found a spot somewhat sheltered by the trees and started to set up our tent. And surprise! We brought the wrong tent! We have a fancy backpacking tent that lets you set up the rainfly before you set up the tent underneath so that your whole tent doesn’t get wet during a storm like this. Instead, we had our big car camping tent that is not super waterproof and ended up taking in some water as we set it up. But hey, a tent is a tent. And this had to be better than the poor guy we saw camping under a tarp suspended between trees.
We changed out of our soaking wet clothes and huddled in our sleeping bags as the storm raged on outside. Water was dripping through our soaked tent cover, splashing into little pools on our sleeping bags and the tent floor. And I’ve never heard thunder so loud and SO long. It literally shook the ground under us and sounded like it was coming from deep inside the mountain, each roll lasting at least 20 seconds. And lightning kept lighting up our whole tent. In total, it thunderstormed for almost 8 hours straight!
We decided that if it was still raining when we woke up the next morning, we would cut our losses, pack up our stuff, and hike the 6 miles back to the car (assuming the burning tree had not actually started a forest fire along the trail).
Luckily, the morning was perfectly clear.
We took our sweet time with breakfast, trying to give all of our stuff as much time as possible to dry out.
We eventually put our damp clothes back on and hit the trails. We checked on the burning tree from the night before, and it appeared that the giant rainfall had successfully removed the threat of forest fire.
It was sunny for about 20 minutes, until we crossed over a ridge and found the fog.
We spent the whole morning hiking through fog, which is pretty familiar territory around Mount Hood. We were excited to come around Bald Mountain, which is one of our favorite hikes. (You can check out one of our favorite visits here.) It always seems to be the place where fog breaks up as it dips into the valley, and it was pretty gorgeous this time around.
We spent the afternoon hiking in and out of fog and drizzle.
I was shocked by how many people were out hiking the trail on such a wild weather weekend! There were tons of people with packs, and lots of folks out running the whole trail. Way to be active, Oregon!
We crossed a lot of rivers and saw a ton of waterfalls, but we didn’t see any blue sky (or mountain top views) for the rest of the day.
I was feeling pretty good on our hike, since most of our day was spent on gently rolling terrain, and even downhill, without a lot of climbing. But the last three or four miles of the day were all uphill. Yikes.
We finished our 17 mile day in an area aptly called “Paradise.” We’d never been there before, but I’d seen enough photos of the area to know it was going to be pretty gorgeous. It was filled with wildflowers (and a ton of fog), and was kind of breathtaking.
We found a nice camping spot with a log to sit on (and lay out our soaked clothes). We made a very uninspiring backpacking meal (why you gotta taste so lame, freeze dried food?), and put on all of our dry layers. I was shivering pretty hard at this point (I’ll blame wearing wet clothes all day, being a bit dehydrated, and probably underfed…whoops), so I crawled into my sleeping bag to warm up while Eric went to get water. Apparently the sky briefly cleared and gave Eric this view at the creek, but I was too tired and cold to go take a look for myself.
We ended up falling asleep around 8 pm and sleeping on and off until 6 am. Of course, it rained ALL night long, filling our little tent with water and soaking all the clothes we had tried so hard to dry out the night before. We weren’t about to go outside to make breakfast, so Eric stuck his arm out the tent door to boil water, and we ate everything inside the cold, wet tent.
We needed to cover around 19 miles to get back to Cloud Cap, so we couldn’t wait too long for things to dry out before packing up. Hooray for starting the day in wet clothes again!
The first few miles of the day were drizzly, but the views were pretty epic.
After a cold and wet morning, the clouds cleared just in time for us to get a little peek at Mount Hood and Timberline Lodge (for those of you who don’t live here, you might recognize the lodge from “The Shining”).
By Sunday, I was getting pretty good at river crossings!
As with all things, Eric was a natural pro.
This portion of the trail was particularly wild because the scenery was so diverse. We hiked through a lot of rocky, barren wilderness, and then would turn the corner to find lush fields and waterfalls.
We had a LOT of climbing to do to get to the high point of Timberline Trail, around 7300 feet. (Mount Hood tops out at around 11,250, so it’s crazy to think how far we were from the summit.)
If you looks closely in the middle of the photo, you can see a river that looks tiny, but was actually really big when we crossed it down below!
The highest points of the hike were above the timberline, so it was a bit of a barren wilderness. Lots of rocks, glaciers, and more fog.
Finally, the sun came out for the last couple of miles! You can see the wall of fog that we escaped to finally get a view of the mountain.
We rolled back into the Cloud Cap parking lot after a total of 42 miles (according to our GPS watches). As per usual for us, it was a gorgeous, sunny day by the time we left. It was a sweet relief to remove our packs, change into warm, dry clothes, and think back on all the miles we had traveled! We circled an entire mountain! On our feet!
Mount Hood is always one for drama, and I’d say this is an anniversary we won’t soon forget.
-Ally
Anita Smith says
What an adventure! Love all the beautiful pictures and both of you!
JUDY GECKELER says
I’m totally impressed with your fortitude and willingness to continue on under such bad weather. Loved reading about your adventure, as always. You should get a badge for all you did on this weekend.
Hugs,
Judy