Climbing on Mt Hood

10,000 people a year attempt to summit Mount Hood. And a heck of a lot of them make it. So in climbing circles Hood is not very impressive. At least until you have been on it in a storm. I have been up on it in a storm and it sucks. Bad weather on Hood can be really bad, arctic bad, antarctic bad, himalayan bad. When you go from Portland to the summit in a single push, and that wis what most people do, you gain 11,000 feet of elevation. This is like climbing from base camp on Everest to the summit in a day. True almost half the climb is in a car on a highway, but the body is still effected. Another thing about Hood is that the upper section of the peak can stink to high heaven, litterally. Just when your wacked from slogging up snow slopes for five hours you get assaulted by sulfor dioxide from active fumerals.

Mountains and nature allow us to summit or not as they decide. If our desires and the cold, unfeeling, calculations of nature run against each other, nature always wins. Climbers are keenly aware of their smallness and fragility, the mountains and high places of the Earth make us aware. It is one reason why so many people go up to the hills. In the city it is all too easy to think ourselves important and in control, superior to the lower lifeforms of the wild. Mt Hood, and its rocky and ice-scared brothers and sisters, is a reminder that we are basically bacteria living on the skin of an apple.