Mt Hood Lookout Mountain

Today we got up and the weather looked a bit crap but we committed to the mission up Lookout Mountain for a view of Mt Hood. We set off from Portland and 40min into the journey we realised we were going a different way to what we thought, but Siri didn't seem to think there was much time difference in it. We were also running a bit behind schedule so were kinda running out of daylight hours fast. Lookout Mountain is apparently the second tallest mountain in Mt Hood National park (just shy of 2000m) so were pretty amped to get up it. As we drove towards the park the cloud cover kinda went away in what seemed like a matter of minutes and we got some amazing views of Mt Hood looming over everything. It stands at 3429m and sits alone (as opposed to in a mountain range) so it is pretty imposing.

Along the way somewhere we realised that we didn't have a national park parking pass. So when we found a sign saying that the ranger station sold passes we backtracked to a nearby one, only to find that they were closed on Sundays. We went next door to a outdoor supplies store and they guy told us we would probably be fine to park on the side of the road. Time was getting away on us a bit so we were getting a bit concerned about darkness falling on us again. Siri also failed us as it seemed that she had plotted the location of the start of the trail at the top of the mountain. Jesses trail book also seemed to give us some sketchy instructions (as did the guy in the outdoors store) and we wasted about 30min looking for the start of the trail. We finally found it (by combining all of the sketchy instructions we had) and it turned out that the trail start sign was missing. We left at about 1:30 which only gave us about 3 hours until the sun went down. The trail book suggested it was a 5 hour hike so we were concious of having to come down in the dark. The first bit of the trail was a pretty good track (for coming down in the dark) but was damn steep. My calves were all like "what the hell do you think you're doing?" and I was all like "stop whinging and sort it out". It was really crap. It was bloody steep too, we climbed about 800m in 4km or something. Towards the top of the first bit it got pretty snowy:

We got up to the Gumjawac Saddle and looked around for the trail on the other side of a 4WD track. We found a sign and set off into a very snowy valley. It was getting pretty hard to find the track at this point as there didn't seem to be any trail markers and there was about 600mm of snow around. It was pretty easy to confirm we were on the trail when we came to creek crossings as there was stepping stones but when I went ahead while Jesse took a photo and he couldn't find my tracks to follow me. We decided that trying to find our way back in the dark would be a bit treacherous. Instead we climbed back up to the saddle and followed the 4WD track for a bit where we got a pretty sweet view of Hood:

Another random photo to show what a cracker day it was and note how low the sun was getting when we were up on the saddle:

So it was unfortunately an unsuccessful attempt at climbing lookout mountain but at least we achieved our primary goal of getting a good look at Hood. We were a bit frustrated that there was no trail markers and wondered if they were removed on purpose to stop using the trail. Either way it seemed pretty dumb. The trip down was pretty quick down the steep trail back to the car and home again. All up I think it was about 11km

For dinns we went to hunt some pizza and drank beer while we watched terrible TV.