For years I’ve looked at the mighty cascades around the Northwest and wondered what it would be like to stand at their summit. I’d climbed some of the smaller ones before, but I’d never hiked one of those beautiful white capped glacial mountains. So when my buddy Stu proposed we hike Mt. Adams, I was ready for the adventure.

Adams is great mountain to start with. It’s taller than Mt. Hood, but is an inactive volcano so the top has rounded out over thousands of years. This makes it a less technical summit, although there were still some pitches where I was glad to have brought along an ice axe. To maximize our time on the mountain, we decided to split our trek into two days. On the first, we climbed up to the “lunch counter” to camp at 9,000 ft. On day two, we tagged the summit.

Although the trail was mostly smooth up to the lunch counter, it was still a challenge lugging all of the camping gear up almost 3,000 feet from the trailhead. For lack of a better option, we were going to use a hefty four-man tent I had that took up most of the space in my 60 liter pack. We started a bit late in the day, so after a few hours of hiking we got to the campsite just in time to pitch the tent before sunset. It was a challenge to get the tent of there, but we had the entire pitch to ourselves that night and it was one of the best pieces of real estate anyone could ask for.

Stu on our way up to the Lunch Counter with Mt. Hood in the background

Aside from an amazing night on the mountain, the other pleasant perk of splitting the climb into two days was that we were afforded a casual morning on day two. We slept in and then took our time with a couple of bowls of oatmeal and some strong cowboy coffee before setting our eyes on the summit. I left everything I wouldn’t need in the tent and felt light on my feet with a nearly empty pack.

Almost right away we had to strap on our crampons and break out our ice axes when we encountered a steep icy pitch. We ascended at almost 1,000 feet per mile, kicking our feet into the mountain’s flank and hosting ourselves up with the axes. This wasn’t proper ice climbing, but it was the closest I’d ever come and it was exactly what I’d looked forward to.

It took us nearly five hours of slow trekking to reach the summit. Standing on top of the mountain I felt like the first time I’d gotten onto the roof of my house as a kid. The view was at once familiar and wondrously new. I saw the path of the Columbia River Valley like a great fissure spreading towards the Ocean. Mt. Hood stood didn’t stand above, but face-to-face with me. The panorama spread hundreds of miles and I could witness the climate change from the high desert of Eastern Oregon to the lush Willamette Valley. It was a neighborhood I knew well, but the elevated perspective showed a side unknown.

Eventually, it was time to go home. We set a course back to camp and back down into the world we knew. But while we had had to fight gravity for every vertical foot on the way up, the descent showed just how much fun downward force can be. There was one clear way to get down the steep wide spans of slush: on your butt. Using our ice axes to control our speed, we slid down the side of the mountain. Pitches that had taken us an hour to get up took us minutes to shoot down.

While we weren’t able to slide right into our campsite, the remainder of the hiking was easy going. We stopped to change into dry socks, pack up our tent and said goodbye to the shelf on the mountain that had been our home the night before. My backpack was a load to bare with all of the gear in it. It was a relatively short distance back to the car, compared to what we’d already covered, and again gravity was working to our aid.

Because we’d gotten a bit of a late start in the day, the sun was setting as we descended the final stretch of trail. Our timing couldn’t have been better though, because we got to watch the sun set over the mountains one last time and made it back to the car without needing to break out our headlamps.

Driving back down toward sea level, we entered the familiar territory I’d just witnessed from above. We stopped in Hood River to get a well earned meal and I chanced a last glance at the ridge of Mt. Adams, silhouetted by the night. It’s summit met with the stars in the sky, a breathtaking view and even more so to know that that was where I had come from.

Mt. Adams

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