Another climbing anniversary
In recognition of the 11th ninth year since one of Mount Hood’s most memorable and tragic climbing accidents, which happened on May 30, 2002, I was going to offer up another short excerpt from On Mount Hood.
The passage would have come from a chapter I call Accident that looks at the tragedies that have unfolded on and around Mount Hood, from the very first time a climber met his maker on the mountain — it was a Portland grocer named Frederic Kirn, who in 1896 was swept off Cooper Spur by a rockslide — to a trio of climbers who tried to sneak in a climb up the Reid Glacier Headwall during a brief weather window in December 2009. In between, the chapter touches on everything from the Mount Hood Triangle and the OES tragedy to a freak accident in the volcanic vents high up on the mountain and a tragic slip that cost a married couple their lives. When the latter happened, I was a few hundred feet below the summit on my very first climb of Hood ever.
But the highlight of Accident, for me anyway, is a story about something that happened eleven nine years ago today. It involved several different climbing teams, a renowned Portland physician climber, a U.S. Air Force Pave Hawk helicopter, and a pararescue jumper named Andrew Canfield.
But rather than share an excerpt from the book here, I instead decided to embed an unbelievable video that captures a dramatic part of the story.
The rest is in the book.
Money Mountain
There are so many different sides to Mount Hood: skiing, climbing, hiking, the surrounding forest, the water, weather, history, people and places. All of which I at least touched on in On Mount Hood.
But there’s also an entirely different side as well: the business side. And while I included a lot of that in the book, I focused on that aspect entirely for a 2,500-word article in the latest issue of Oregon Business magazine. Enjoy.
Hood History
Some of the most interesting stories about Mount Hood come from the early days of its exploration by the people who came to live in Portland and its surrounds. Like the disputed first summit by Thomas J. Dryer, publisher of what became The Oregonian, in 1854. (Three years later, one of Dryer’s employees, Henry Pittock, was part of a team that bagged the official first ascent.) And the reason that Illumination Rock, a prominent outcropping at about 9,500 feet on Hood’s southwest shoulder, is called Illumination Rock. (Various parties in the 1870s and 1880s hauled a substance known as red fire to the rock and the mountain’s summit and set about illuminating the peak for the masses back in Portland to see.)
One of my favorites is the story of where the Mazamas, a long-standing mountaineering and outdoor club based in Portland, got its start in 1894. From the group’s web site:
Responding to an advertisement run in the Morning Oregonian of June 12, 1894: “To Mountain Climbers and Lovers of Nature . . . It has been decided to meet on the summit of Mt. Hood on the 19th of next month …” more than 300 people encamped on the flanks of Mt. Hood on July 18. By 8:00 am the next day, the first climbing party reached the 11,239’ summit, followed by the rest of the 193 men and women who were to reach the summit that day. One hundred and five climbers became charter members.
And here’s a photo from that very day, courtesy of the Mazamas.
25 years ago . . . the OES tragedy on Mount Hood
Today marks 25 years since the worst climbing accident in all Mount Hood history: Nine dead, seven of them high school students from the Oregon Episcopal School. They’d been part of a team climbing the mountain for OES’ annual Basecamp Wilderness Education Program. The weather turned hellish, they didn’t turn around, the climb fell apart. Searchers found three bodies two days later; six more the next day in a snow cave buried under five feet of snow, but also, miraculously, two survivors.
For a number of reasons, I didn’t dwell too deeply on the OES disaster in On Mount Hood. I did touch on it, of course, and I also wrote briefly about its legacy on Mount Hood 25 years later for Portland Monthly this month. The latter story included an interview with Rocky Henderson, a well-known search-and-rescue volunteer whose very first mission ever with Portland Mountain Rescue was the OES climb.
“It was so frustrating,” Henderson told me of the search efforts. “When the weather finally cleared, we thought, ‘OK, now we’re definitely going to find them.’ But we didn’t. By then, there were no clues as to where they were. They had been completely obliterated by the storm.”
Something about climbing accidents intrigues people, myself included. And Mount Hood has had its share of them. But even though I was 12 and living in Ohio when it happened, there’s something singular about the OES accident. The scale of it, the what-ifs, the age of the victims. It’s heartbreaking. I read The Mountain Never Cries, a book by Ann Holaday, mother of Giles Thompson, one of the two OES survivors. I read all of the stories in the Oregonian from during and after the accident, the People magazine story, the piece in Backpacker, and on and on.
It is a sad but incredible story. One worth remembering, always.
On MOUNT HOOD 