John H. Williams

“ Mount Hood is the highest mountain in Oregon, and because of a general symmetry in its pyramidal shape and its clear-cut, far-seen features of rock and glacier, it has long been recognized as one of the most beautiful of all American snow peaks. Rising from the crest of the Cascades, it presents its different profiles and variously sculptured faces to the entire valley of the Columbia, east and west, above which it towers in stately magnificence, a very king of the mountains, ruling over a domain of ranges, valleys and cities proud of their allegiance. ”

“ Coming at last to the rim of the forest, you look out over the sea, where go lumber-laden ships to all the world. Close by the beach, dwarfed and distorted by winds of the ocean, and nourished by its fogs, north-coast pine (Pinus contorta) extends its prostrate forms over the cliffs and dunes of the shore, just as your first acquaintance, the white-bark pine, spreads over the dunes and ridges of the mountain. They are brothers of a noble race. ”

“ Rimming about your peak, braving winds and the snows that drift in the lee of old moraines, and struggling to break through the timber-line, six thousand feet above the sea, somber mountain hemlocks (Tsuga mertensiana) and lighter white-bark pines (Pinus albicaulis) form the thin vanguard of the forest. They meet the glaciers. They border the snow-fields. They hide beneath their stunted, twisted forms the first deep gashes carved in the mountain slopes by eroding streams. ”

“ Innumerable craters build cones of lava and scoriæ along the Cascade uptilt, and scatter clouds of volcanic ashes upon the steady sea winds, to blanket the country for hundreds of miles with deep layers of future soil.
A reign of ice follows the era of tropic heat. Stupendous glaciers grind the volcanic rocks, and carving new valleys, endow them with fertility for new forests that will rise where once the palm forests stood. With advancing age, the earth grows cold and quiet, awakening only to an occasional volcanic eruption or earthquake as a reminder of former violence. ”

“ As a wild, magnificent sea of ice-covered mountain tops, the Alps have no parallel in America. As a far-reaching system of splendid lofty ranges clothed in the green of dense forests and surmounted by towering, isolated summits of snowy volcanoes, the Cascades are wholly without their equal in Europe. This is the testimony of famous travelers and alpinists, among them Ambassador Bryce, who has written of our Northwestern mountain scenery:
We have nothing more beautiful in Switzerland or Tyrol, in Norway or in the Pyrenees. ”

“ Winding up from the south comes the Willamette, its fine valley narrowed here by the hills, where the river forms Portland's harbor, and is lined on either side with mills and shipping. Ten miles beyond, the Columbia flows down from its canyon on the east, and turns northward, [58] an expanding waterway for great vessels, to its broad pass through the Coast Range. In every direction, city and country, farm and forest, valley and mountain, stretches a noble perspective. ”

“ As we look down from some aerial viewpoint, behold! there is no Mount Hood and no Cascade Range. The volcanic snow-peaks of Oregon and Washington are still embryo in the womb of earth. We stand face to face with the beginnings of the Northwest.
Far south and east of our castle-in-the-air, islands rise slowly out of a Pacific that has long rolled, unbroken, to the Rocky Mountains. [24] We see the ocean bed pushed above the tide in what men of later ages will call the Siskiyou and the Blue Mountains, one range in southwestern, the other in eastern, Oregon. ”

“ Looking down over its easy slope, one recognizes even more clearly than from the north-side view that Mount Hood is merely a wreck of its former graceful cone, a torn and disintegrating remnant, with very modest pretensions to symmetry, after all, but still a fascinating exhibit of the work of such Gargantuan forces as hew and whittle such peaks. ”

“ Mount Adams is ascended without difficulty by either its north or south slope. On the east and west faces, the cliffs and ice cascades appall even the expert alpinist. As yet, so far as I can learn, no ascents have been made over these slopes. The southern route is the more popular one. It leads by well-marked trails up from Guler or Glenwood, over a succession of terraces clad in fine, open forest; ascends McDonald Ridge, amid increasing barriers of lava; passes South Butte, a decaying pillar of red silhouetted against the black rocks and white snow-fields ”

“ If you do not know these upland "parks," there is rare pleasure awaiting you. A hundred mountain blossoms work figures of white and red and orange and [126] blue in the soft tapestry of green. In such glades the hush is deep. Only the voice of a waterfall comes up from the canyon, or the whistle of a marmot, the call of the white-winged crows and the drone of insects break the stillness.
Dense Hemlock Forest, lower west slope of Mount Hood. ”

“ The various action of trees, rooting themselves in inhospitable rocks, stooping to look into ravines, hiding from the search of glacial winds, reaching forth to the rays of rare sunshine, crowding down together to drink at sweetest streams, climbing hand in hand the difficult slopes, gliding in grave procession over the heavenward ridges—nothing of this can be conceived among the unvexed and unvaried felicities of the lowland forest.—Ruskin: "Modern Painters." ”

“ Not until the visitor has scaled one of the neighboring aiguilles, can he command a satisfactory outlook toward the Monarch of the Alps. And nowhere in Switzerland do I recall a picture of such memorable splendor as greets the traveler from the Columbia, journeying either southward, up the Hood River Valley [64]
[65]
[66] toward Mount Hood, or northward, up the White Salmon Valley toward Trout Lake and Mount Adams. Here is unrolled a wealth of fertile lowlands, surrounded by lofty ranges made beautiful by their deep forests and rising to grandeur in their snow-peaks. ”

“ Trees of eight feet diameter are at least three hundred years old, and rare ones, much larger, have been cut showing an age of more than five centuries.
To these areas of the greatest trees must come all who would know the real spirit of the forest, at once beneficent and ruthless. Here nature selects the fittest. The struggle for soil below and light above is relentless. The weakling, crowded and overshadowed, inevitably deepens the forest floor with its fallen trunk, adding to the humus that covers the lavas, and nourishing in its decay the more fortunate rival that has robbed it of life. ”

“ In a few hours he stands upon a barren shoulder of the peak, at timber line. A new world confronts him. The glaciers reach their icy arms to him from the summit, and he breathes the winds that sweep down from their fields of perennial snow. ”

“ Fir, spruce and cedar you will see along the slopes of the Cascades in varying density and grandeur, from thickets of slender trees reclaiming fire-swept lands to broken ranks of patriarchs whose crowns have swayed before the storms of centuries. ”

“ But it is so wonderful that Americans who love the heights can no longer neglect it, and each year increasing numbers are discovering that here in the Northwest is mountain scenery worth traveling far to see, with very noble mountains [67] to climb, true glaciers to explore, and the widest views of grandeur and interest to enjoy. Such sport combines recreation and inspiration.
Looking across the head of Eliot glacier from near the summit of Mount Hood.
The traveler from Portland to either Mount Hood or Mount Adams may go by rail or steamer to Hood River, Oregon, or White Salmon, Washington. ”

“ Forest Fire on east fork of Hood River. From a photograph taken at Cloud Cap Inn five minutes after the fire started.
Reforestation is indispensable as insurance. Let us see to it that the untillable hills shall ever bear these matchless forests, emerald settings for our snow-peaks. On their future depends, in great degree, the future of the Northwest. As protectors of the streams that nourish our valleys, and perennial treasuries of power for our industries, they are guarantors of life and well-being to the millions that will soon people the vast Columbia basin. ”

“ The actual summit of Mount Hood is a narrow but fairly level platform, a quarter of a mile long, which is quickly seen to be part of the rim of the ancient crater. Below it, on the north, are the heads of three glaciers already mentioned, the Eliot, Coe and Ladd; and looking down upon them, the climber perceives that here the mountain has been so much cut away as to be less a slope than a series of precipices, with very limited benches which serve as gathering grounds of snow. ”

“ Illumination Rock is seen beyond.
The south-side route, followed by the Barlow party of 1854, was long deemed the only practicable trail to [80] the summit. Many years later, William A. Langille discovered the route up from Cooper Spur. The only accident charged against this path befell a stranger who was killed in trying to climb it without a guide. Its steepness is, indeed, an advantage, as it requires less time than the other route. Climbers frequently ascend by one trail and descend by the other, thus making the trip between Cloud Cap Inn and Government Camp in a day. ”

“ Mazama, Rusk, Lava, Pinnacle and Avalanche glaciers lie beneath cliffs too steep to carry ice-streams. Their income is mainly collected from the slopes, and if they receive snow from the broad summit at all, it is chiefly in the avalanches of early summer. Nearly all the glaciers, however, are thus fed in part, the steep east and west faces making Mount Adams famous for its avalanches.
Mount Adams, seen from the northeast, with the Lyman glaciers in center, Rusk glacier on extreme left, and Lava glacier, right. The ridge beyond Lava glacier is the north-side route to the summit. ”

“ Here, from a height of nine thousand feet, we look down on the low, wide reservoir of Mazama glacier on the east, and up to the ice-falls above Klickitat glacier on the higher slopes beyond. The great platform on which we stand was built up by a crater, three thousand feet below the summit. The climb to it has disclosed the fact that the mountain is composed mostly of lava. Some of the ravine cuttings have shown lapilli and cinders, but these are rarer than on the other Northwestern peaks. The harder structure has resisted the erosion which is cutting so deeply into the lower slopes of Hood. ”

“ Eliot glacier has been found by measurement near its end, to have a movement of about fifty feet a year. On the steeper slope above, it is doubtless much greater. All the three glaciers are heavily covered, for their last half mile, with rocks and dirt which they have freighted down from the cliffs above, or dug up from their own beds in transit. None of the lateral moraines extends more than two or three hundred yards below the snout of its glacier. Each glacier, at its end, drops its remnant of ice into a deep V-shaped ravine, in which, not far below, trees of good size are growing. ”

“ Helens. Spirit-like, they loom above the soft Oregon haze, their glaciers signaling from peak to peak, and their shining summits bidding the sordid world below to look upward.
Enlarge Mount Hood, elevation 11,225 feet
Nature has painted canvases more colorful, but none more perfect in its strength and rest. Here is no flare of the desert, none of the flamboyant, terrible beauty of the Grand Canyon. It is a land [59] of warm ocean winds and cherishing sunshine, where the emeralds and jades of the valleys quickly give place to the bluer greens of evergreen forests that cover the hill country ”

“ The molten stream flowed westward to Goat Mountain and the "Buttes," of which it made islands; threw a dike across a watercourse and created Lake Merrill; and turning southward, filled valleys and overwhelmed good forest with sheets of basalt. Upon the slope just north of Peterson's, a great synclinal thus buried presents one of the latest pages in the volcanic history of the Columbia basin.
Mount Adams from the southwest, with White Salmon glacier (left) and Avalanche glacier (right) flowing from a common source, the cleft between North and Middle Peaks. ”

“ The result is the division of Switzerland into an upper and lower mountain world; the lower world consisting of rich valleys, the upper world, reached after the first steep banks of 3,000 to 4,000 feet have been surmounted, consisting of comparatively level but most desolate tracts, half covered by glacier, and stretching to the feet of the true pinnacles of the chain. ”

“ It is the center of a fine lake and river district which attracts sportsmen as well as mountain climbers. A large company visiting it must carry in supplies and camp equipment, but small parties may find accommodation at Spirit Lake on the north, and Peterson's ranch on Lewis River, south of the peak. The first is four, the second is eight, miles from the snow line. Visitors from Portland, Tacoma or Seattle, bound for the north side, leave the railway at Castle Rock, whence a good automobile road (forty-eight miles) leads to the south side of Spirit Lake. ”