Part 5

The mountain has been climbed more often than any other American snow-peak. The first ascent was made on August 4, 1854, from the south side, by a party under Captain Barlow, builder of the "immigrant road." One of the climbers, Editor Dryer of _The Oregonian_, published an account of the trip in which, with more exactness than accuracy, he placed the height of the mountain at 18,361 feet! The most notable ascent by a large party took place forty years later, when nearly two hundred men and women met on the summit, and there, with parliamentary dispatch bred of a bitter wind, organized a mountain club which has since become famous. For its title they took the name "mazama," Mexican for the mountain goat, close kin to the Alpine chamois. Membership was opened to those who have scaled a snow-peak on foot. By their publications and their annual climbs, the Mazamas have done more than any other agency to promote interest in our Northwestern mountains.

Mount Hood stands, as I have said, upon the summit of the Cascades. The broad and comparatively level back of the range is here about four thousand feet above the sea. Upon this plane the volcano erected its cone, chiefly by the expulsion of scoriæ rather than by extensive lava flows, to a farther height of nearly a mile and a half. There is no reason to suppose that it ever greatly exceeded its present altitude, which government observations have fixed at 11,225 feet. Its diameter at its base is approximately seven miles from east to west.

Compared with Mount Adams, its broken and decapitated northern neighbor, Mount Hood, although probably dating from Miocene time, is still young enough to have retained in a remarkable degree the general shape of its original cone. But as we approach it from any direction, we find abundant proof that powerful destructive agents have been busy during the later geological ages. Already the summit plateau upon which the peak was built up has been largely dissected by the glaciers and their streams. The whole neighborhood of the mountain is a vastly rugged district of glacial canyons and eroded water channels, trenched deep in the soft volcanic ashes and the underlying ancient rock of the range. The mountain itself, although still a pyramid, also has its story of age and loss. Its eight glaciers have cut away much of its mass. On three sides they have burrowed so deeply into the cone that its original angle, which surviving ridges show to have been about thirty degrees, has on the upper glacial slopes been doubled. This is well illustrated by the views shown on pages 58, 61, 69 and 71.

This cutting back into the mountain has greatly lessened the area of the upper snow-fields. The reservoirs feeding the glaciers, are therefore much smaller than of old, but, by way of compensation, present a series of most interesting ice formations on the steeper slopes. In this respect, Mount Hood is especially noteworthy among our Northwestern snow-peaks. While larger glaciers are found on other mountains, none are more typical. The glaciers of Hood especially repay study because of their wonderful variety of ice-falls, terraces, seracs, towers, castles, pinnacles and crevasses. Winter has fashioned a colossal architecture of wild forms.

Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow Adown enormous ravines slope amain,-- Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice, And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge! Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!

The visitor who begins his acquaintance with Mount Hood on the north side has, from Cloud Cap Inn, four interesting glaciers within a radius of a few miles. Immediately before the Inn, Eliot glacier displays its entire length of two miles, its snout being only a few rods away. West of this, Coe and Ladd glaciers divide the north face with the Eliot. All three have their source in neighboring reservoirs near the summit, which have been greatly reduced in area. This, with the resulting shrinkage in the glaciers, is shown by the high lateral moraines left as the width of the ice streams has lessened. On the east slope is a fine cliff glacier, the Newton Clark, separated from the Eliot by Cooper Spur, a long ridge that furnishes the only feasible north-side route for climbers to the summit.

Climbing Cooper Spur is a tedious struggle up a long cinder slope, but it has its reward in fine views of the near-by glaciers and a wide outlook over the surrounding country. A tramp of three miles from the Inn covers the easier grade, and brings the climber to a height of eight thousand feet. A narrow, snow-covered chine now offers a windy path to the foot of the steeper slope (See p. 60). The climb ends with the conquest of a half-mile of vertical elevation over a grade that tests muscle, wind and nerve. This is real mountaineering, and as the novice clutches the rocks, or carefully follows in the steps cut by the guide, he recalls a command well adapted to such trying situations: "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." But the danger is more apparent than real, and the goal is soon reached.

The south-side route, followed by the Barlow party of 1854, was long deemed the only practicable trail to 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.

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. (See pp. 55, 67 and 70.) These shelves feed the lower ice-streams with a diet of avalanches that is year by year becoming less bountiful as this front becomes more steep. Soon, indeed, geologically speaking, the present summit, undermined by the ice, must fall, and the mountain take on a new aspect, with a lower, broader top. Thus while the beautiful verse which I have quoted under the view of Mount Hood from White Salmon (p. 56) is admirable poetry, its last line is very poor geology. This, however, need not deter any present-day climbers!

On the south side of the summit ridge a vastly different scene is presented. 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.

The crater had a diameter of about half a mile. Its north rim remains in the ridge on which our climber stands. All the rest of its circumference has been torn away, but huge fragments of its wall are seen far below, on the right and left, in "cleavers" named respectively Illumination Rock and Steel's Cliff. One of these recalls several displays of red fire on the mountain by the Mazamas. The other great abutment was christened in honor of the first president of that organization.

Apart from these ridges, the entire rim is missing; but below the spectator, at what must have been the center of its circle, towers a great cone of lava, harder than the andesitic rocks and the scoriæ which compose the bulk of the mountain. This is known as Crater Rock. It is the core of the crater, formed when the molten lava filling its neck cooled and hardened. Around it the softer mass has worn down to the general grade of the south slope, which extends five miles from just below the remaining north rim at the head of the glaciers to the neighborhood of Government Camp, far down on the Cascade plateau. The grade is much less than thirty degrees. Over the slope flow down two glaciers, the Zigzag on the west, and the White River glacier on the east, of Crater Rock.

It is sometimes said that the south side of the old summit was blown away by a terrific explosion. That is improbable, in view of Crater Rock, which indicates a dormant volcano when the south side was destroyed. The mountain was doubtless rent by ice rather than by fire. The mass of ice and snow in and upon the crater broke apart the comparatively loose wall, and pushed its shattered tuffs and cinders far down the slopes. Forests were buried, old canyons were filled, and the whole southwest side of the mountain was covered with the fan-shaped outwash from the breach. Through this debris of the ancient crater the streams at the feet of the glaciers below are cutting vast ravines which can be seen from the heights above. (See illustrations, pp. 77-81.)

The central situation of Mount Hood makes the view from its summit especially worth seeking. From the Pacific to the Blue Mountains, south almost to the California line, and north as far, it embraces an area equal to a great state, with four hundred miles of the undulating Cascade summits and a dozen calm and radiant snow-peaks. The Columbia winds almost at its foot, and a multitude of lakes, dammed by glacial moraines and lava dikes, nestle in its shadow. This view "covers more history," as Lyman points out, than that from any other of our peaks. About its base the Indians hunted, fished and warred. Across its flank rolled the great tide of Oregon immigration, in the days of the ox-team and settler's wagon. It has seen the building of two states. It now looks benignly down upon the prosperous agriculture and growing cities of the modern Columbia basin, and no doubt contemplates with serenity the time when its empire shall be one of the most populous as it is one of the most beautiful and fertile regions in America. No wonder the shapely mountain lifts its head with pride!

Returning to the glaciers of the north side, we note that all three end at an altitude close to six thousand feet. None of them has cut a deep, broad bed for itself like the great radiating canyons which dissect the Rainier National Park and protect its glaciers down to a level averaging four thousand feet. Instead, these glaciers lie up on the side of Mount Hood, in shallow beds which they no longer fill; and are banked between double and even triple border moraines, showing successive advances and retreats of the glaciers. (See illustration, top of p. 59.) The larger moraines stand fifty to a hundred feet above the present ice-streams, thus indicating the former glacier levels. No vegetation appears on these desolate rock and gravel dikes. The retreat of the glaciers was therefore comparatively recent.

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. Hence it would not seem that these north-side glaciers have ever extended much farther than they do at present. The ravine below Eliot glacier, however, half a mile from the snout, is said to show glacial markings on its rocky sides. It is evident, in any case, that the deep V cuttings now found below the glaciers are work of the streams. If these glaciers extended farther, it was at higher levels than their present stream channels. As the glaciers receded, their streams have cut the deep gorges in the soft conglomerates. Between Eliot and Coe glaciers are large snow-fields, ending much farther up than do the glaciers; and below these, too, the streams have trenched the slope. (See illustration, p. 57.)

Between Coe and Ladd glaciers is a high rocky ridge known as Barrett Spur, from which, at nearly 8,000 feet, one may obtain glorious views of the peak above, the two glaciers sweeping down its steep face and the sea of ranges stretching westward. (See illustrations, pp. 69 and 75.) Barrett Spur may have been part of the original surface of the mountain, but is more likely the remnant of a secondary cone, ice and weathering having destroyed its conical shape. From its top, the climber looks over into the broad-bottomed canyon of Sandy River, fed by the large and small Sandy glaciers of the west slope. (See pp. 71 and 76.) This canyon and that of the Zigzag River, south of it, from Zigzag glacier, are "plainly glacier-sculptured," as Sylvester declares. The same is true of the canyon lying below the White River glacier, on the southeast slope. In journeying to Government Camp, one may see abundant evidence of the glacial origin of the Sandy and Zigzag canyons. The White River Canyon has been thoroughly explored and described by Prof. Reid.

All three of these wide U-shaped canyons were once occupied by great glaciers, which left their record in the scorings upon the sides of the gorges; in the mesas of finely ground moraine which they spread over the bottoms and through which the modern rivers have cut deep ravines; in trees broken and buried by the glaciers in this drift; in the fossil ice lying beneath it, and in huge angular boulders left standing on the valley floors, several miles from the mountain.

Sandy glacier extends three hundred feet farther down the slope than do the north-side glaciers, but the Zigzag and White River glaciers, flowing out of the crater, end a thousand feet higher. This is due not only to the smaller reservoirs which feed them and to their southern exposure, but also doubtless to the easier grade, which holds the ice longer on the slope. On the east side of the peak is a broad ice-stream, the Newton Clark glacier, which also ends at a high altitude, dropping its ice over a cliff into deep ravines at the head of East Fork of Hood River. This glacier, well seen from Cooper Spur, completes the circuit of the mountain. (See pp. 83 and 84.)

Sylvester suggests that Mount Hood may not be extinct but sleeping. For this, however, there is little more evidence that may be discovered on other Northwestern peaks. About Crater Rock, steam jets are found, gas escapes, and the rocks are warm in many places. "Fumaroles" exist, where the residuary heat causes openings in the snow bed. Sylvester reports dense smoke and steam issuing from Crater Rock by day and a brilliant illumination there at night, in August, 1907. But volcanoes sometimes contradict prophecy, and no further intimations of trouble having since been offered, this display may be deemed the last gasp of a dying monster rather than an awakening toward new life.

MOUNT ADAMS.

Going up the White Salmon Valley toward Mount Adams, the visitor quickly realizes that he is in a different geological district from that around Mount Hood. The Oregon peak is mainly a pile of volcanic rocks and cinders ejected from its crater. Little hard basalt is found, and in all its circumference I know of only one large surface area of new lava. This is a few miles north of Cloud Cap, and so recent that no trees grow on it. But north of the Columbia, one meets evidences of comparatively recent lava sheets in many parts of the valley. Some obviously have no connection with Mount Adams; they flowed out of fissures on the ridges. But these beds of volcanic rock become more apparent, and are less covered with soil, as we approach the mountain, until, long before timber line is reached, dikes and streams of basalt, as yet hardly beginning to disintegrate, are found on all sides of the peak.

The form and slope of Mount Adams tell of an age far greater than Mount Hood's, but its story is not, like that of Hood, the legible record of a simple volcanic cone. It wholly lacks the symmetry of such a pile. Viewed from a distance, it sits very majestically upon the summit of one of the eastern ranges of the Cascades. As we approach, however, it is seen to have little of the conical shape of Hood, still less that of graceful St. Helens, which is young and as yet practically unbroken. Its summit has been much worn down by ice or perhaps by explosions. Some of its sides are deeply indented, and all are vastly irregular in angle and markings--here a face now too steeply cut to hold a glacier, but showing old glacial scorings far down its slope; there another terraced and ribbed with waves and dikes of lava. The mountain is a long ridge rather than a round peak, and close inspection shows it to be a composite of several great cones, leaning one upon another,--the product of many craters acting in successive ages. On its ancient, scarred slopes, a hundred modern vents have added to the ruggedness and interest of the peak. Many of these blowholes built parasitic cones, from which the snows of later centuries have eroded the loose external mass, leaving only the hard lava cores upstanding like obelisks. Other vents belched out vast sheets of rock that will require a century more of weathering to make hospitable even to the sub-alpine trees most humble in their demands for soil.

Mount Adams therefore presents a greater variety of history, a more complex and fascinating problem for the student to unravel, than any of its neighbors. This interest extends to the district about it, a country of new lava flows covering much of the older surface. The same conditions mark the region surrounding the newer peak, St. Helens, thirty miles west. In each district, sheets of molten rock have been poured across an ancient and heavily forested land. Thus as we travel up the rich valleys leading from the Columbia to either peak, we meet everywhere the phenomena of vulcanism.