Circumnavigation Mt Hood: Part One of Three Mountain walk arounds

Meadows ski area

 A few years ago I was going to hike around Mt Rainier on the Wonderland trail, for a variety of different reason that trip was cancelled.  This year I decided to try again - the trail is 93 miles with 24,000 feet elevation gain and loss.  To train for this adventure I decided to circumnavigate Mt Hood since it was in my back yard.  The Timberline trail on Mt Hood is about 41 miles with 9,000 feet elevation gain with many river crossings - Eliot Glacier being the most sketchy because of a storm years ago that wiped out the bridge.  This trail seemed like good training for Mt Rainier to figure out gear, food and distances traveled in a day.

The plan was to hike it in two days, start and finish at Timberline Lodge.  Camp at Elk Cove camp ground and get the big river crossings done in the first day.  The weekend we chose happen to be the hottest days of the year with highs over 100 degrees in Hood River.  We were lucky, there were lots of places to refill water.

Day one = 18 miles



Hike from Timberline Lodge to Elk Cove Campground.  Crossing the White River, Eliot River.  Beautiful landscape Mt Hood Meadows ski resort was covered in alpine wild flowers, there were a few snow fields at the highest point of the hike as we made our way over to the Eliot Glacier.  Crossing the Eliot was not as hard as we thought, primarily because we ran into a man who we named "detail man" that gave us almost a step by step account of how to cross and what we would find - this turned out to be pretty helpful, we knew to look for the down rope, where the best place to cross the river with the least amount of flow volume and where to find the up rope to get out.  Coming out of the Eliot Glacier basin felt like a huge accomplishment - the day was not over we still had a few more miles before Elk Cove through some of the forest fire land.

Lamberson Spur

Eliot

up roping out of Eliot canyon

fire damage on the north east of Hood

Day two = 23 miles


The lupine in the morning was incredible.  Hiking down to the Sandy river felt very long through the forest, but it was nice sun protection.  We reached the Sandy River in the heat of the day - 100 degrees!  Crossing the river was easy across a sturdy log bridge.  From the Sandy River it is 9 miles all up hill to Timberline lodge.  I broke it down in threes - three miles to Paradise, another three miles to Zig Zag river, last three to Timberline lodge.  As with most trips the last three felt longer than the first 10 miles, rounding the last corner and spotting the Timberline lodge was a welcome sight in my tired, hungry and thirsty state.  In the parking lot we ran into a group from Hood River - we quickly cleaned the fine Hood dust off of us, changed and went to the historic Timberline Lodge for a well deserved beverage and food.

lupine fields in the morning glow

Sandy River - 9 more miles

 hiking up to Paradise

GEAR:
We tried to keep it as light as possible.  We did bring a tent, no stove.  Both of us wore trail running shoes with trail running gators - gators are key with all the fine dust.  Our meals were pb&j's for breakfast, premade vegetarian wraps for lunch and dinner and lots of bars to snack on.  We used iodine to purify our water.

Done!

RESOURCES:
We used Green Trail Map 4625 Mount Hood
Timberline Trail