Climbing Hood — another time

As I’ve mentioned before, everyone around here seems to have their own connection to or story about Mount Hood.

I got to talking with Kim Cooper Findling, an Oregon writer and author of Chance of Sun: An Oregon Memoir and Day Trips from Portland, Oregon, the other day at a local book and author fair, and she shared one of hers with me. In a way, though, it wasn’t entirely hers, but that of Marion May, her grandmother, who climbed Mount Hood in 1938.

(All photos in this post courtesy of Kim Cooper Findling)

Kim said her grandmother, who was born and raised in Portland and lived most of her adult life in Forest Grove, was 28 when she made the haul to the summit of Mount Hood in a group led by her pastor. It was a time of old-school alpenstocks, wool clothing, fedoras, and fixed ropes running up Cooper Spur.

It was also back when a lookout cabin still crowned the summit of Hood. (That’s Marion at the far right, in profile.)

Kim said she’s not climbed the mountain herself. But she’s written about it a bit in her books, and she’s snowshoed high enough on it to be inspired to go the rest of the way someday:

I myself haven’t climbed. The closest was when my husband and I stayed at Timberline years ago. I, being not much of a skier, hauled a pair of snowshoes out to the flanks of the mountain and climbed straight up for a good long while before I got tired and it started to get dark. Even that small experience gave me a sense of the stillness, beauty, steepness, and peace of the mountain. I loved being alone in that stillness. I’ll have to work through my fear of exposure, but climbing Hood is definitely on my list. 

Many thanks, Kim, for sharing both your grandmother’s photos and your stories of Mount Hood.