Friday and Saturday, 14-April-2023 and 15-April-2023
It’s been a hot minute since I went backpacking… and an even hotter minute since I’ve been backpacking with someone!
This weekend, I’d be taking Jess on her first snow backpacking experience – so I went with the basics, and we headed up to the White River Glacier to hopefully take advantage of the campsite that I’d tamped down back in… January? Okay, yeah there’s no way that campsite is still prepared.
Ahh well – it’d just make it more of a learning experience, right? Right. Right!
Friday:
We got a nice Pine State biscuits breakfast, and headed into the woods. Snow. Onto the Glacier.
As always, it was beautiful.
As always, there’s not much to say about walking. We snowshoed, it was fun, had a blast.
Got to camp, carved out a campsite, and settled in for a relaxing and cold evening… good books, good gin, and delicious cocoa!
Nothing really huge of note, though I was really happy with how the tent site came out!
Saturday:
Saturday dawned nice and clear, with a beautifully crisp and cold world around the campsite.
We had some coffee and tea, a good breakfast, and headed upward, toward the little overlook at the top of the glacier. It was lovely, with solid snow and great views of the Cascades down to the south – and some stellar clouds filtering the light around us!
We hiked upward, and descended back down. Packed up camp, and made the shortish walk back to the car… just in time to make the early dinner bell at the Timberline Lodge, and get to see the sunset from the restaurant!
We see each other a few times a year, we catch up, and we appreciate each others quiet company. We take a few hours to reconnect, and I head back to my world and Elk Meadows resumes its quiet contentment on the side of a beautiful mountain. The rivers run, the snow deepens, and everything is right.
I don’t often camp out at Elk Meadows in the winter – I’d love to, don’t get me wrong, but unfortunately the trailhead is snowed in this time of year, and the only parking area nearby is day-use only… and it’s well frequented enough that I worry about getting towed instead of just ticketed. Day trips are the name of the game in the winter.
Which is a bit of a bummer… but it means that I don’t stay overnight, and drive home… which also means that I can get dinners on the drive back. At… ohh, say the Timberline Lodge, as a specific example relevant to tonight’s story.
I… uhh…
I hiked Elk Meadows. And then had dinner at the Timberline Lodge.
That’s basically it. The rest, as they say, are just details.
One interesting detail, though… I ran into a guy backpacking! Right on the river… definitely an interesting spot, but it was neat to run into someone else snow camping. Not something I see particularly often, which made it a bit memorable.
Wednesday, 10-Nov-2021 through Monday, 15-Nov-2021
My friends came to visit!
Two weekends in a row… I’m the most social of all the social butterflies, it seems!
And honestly, I’m so thankful for it. 2021 was, for mas as for everyone, a challenging year. It’d been a year of huge personal growth, and excellent introspection, but at my core I’m still a social creature. Self-reflection is only a part of the growth cycle… sharing those insights, and getting other people’s input, is just as important to someone’s growth.
So when Daniel and Erin asked if they could come to visit the weekend after Dillon and Liz’s wedding… well, I couldn’t say yes fast enough!
Saturday, 13-Nov-2021
After the day of hiking in the rain, we were pretty excited for a slightly drier walk in the woods on Saturday. Not that there’s anything wrong with hiking in the rain… but… you know. Warmer. Drier. Less sticky during the drive home.
With the weather looking a bit gloomy again in the gorge, but with clear skies to the East of Mt. Hood, our destination was obvious… One of my favorite hikes of the last few years, Elk Meadows!
It was a bit weird, to be honest, thinking of sharing this hike with friends. I’d done it some many times solo that it felt strange to be chatting as we walked… I think the last time I hiked it with someone else was back in June or July of 2020 when I’d first met Laurel.
But, as with everything else this weekend, the change was glorious and hugely appreciated. I love getting to share my passions with other people, and this was definitely no exception – hearing their exclamations as we turned a bend and Mt. Hood came into view for the first time was amazing, and helped me relive the joy of my own first few times seeing the views.
Breakfast bagels were delicious, the drive was beautiful, the trail was amazing, the river crossings were entertaining, and the meadow itself was just as welcoming as I’ve always found it to be.
The wildlife was almost more welcoming than I’d come to expect. The Grey Jay’s of Mt. Hood and I have come to know each other pretty well, but I wasn’t sure what their opinion of Daniel and Erin would be…
Turns out, I didn’t have to worry one iota – the Jay’s absolutely adored them both, and we ended up spending… ohh, probably an hour? Doing photoshoots and handing out offerings of peanuts to the tiny little buggers. it was awesome, cute, and we even got to watch Daniel somehow survive a bird landing on his head!
It was still pretty early in the day after our wildlife photo session, and we were all feeling pretty energetic with the sun high and the breeze warm. A quick tour of the meadow didn’t burn out our remaining energy, so upward and onward we went onto the Bluegrass trail.
It’d been a while since I’d explored the Bluegrass ridge, and I was optimistic that we’d be able to get some good views of the various cascade volcanoes from the top… the day was clear, after all, and the morning had burned off most of the remaining clouds.
It was cold, and windy, and rather challenging terrain as we explored. With friends though, it’s always a bit easier and we made great progress as the day went on. The views didn’t quite ever materialize, and the day did start getting quite a bit colder as it went on… so we took the main trail back in short order, finding ourselves back on the road just a bit before sunset.
Sunset didn’t see us on the road home, though… instead, we made our way up to the Timberline lodge!
Bringing my Mom out to the lodge for brunch had reminded me just how amazing the Timberline Lodge was… and having gone probably an entire year without visiting their restaurant had left me with enough of a craving that a single meal couldn’t be expected to quench it.
There wasn’t too much on the menu at the Ram’s Head, though, and we ended up going fairly simple – I got an amazing tomato soup for myself! It ended up being quite a bit more filling than expected, and easily tided us over until we got back into town.
