The prognosis for Friday above five thousand feet required more than a snowfoot, strong winds and temperatures well below freezing. So serious were the models that the National Meteorological Service had issued a winter storm warning for much of the southern Washington waterfalls, and around Mount Hood in Oregon.
“Why are you going to go tomorrow?” A colleague had asked. On weekends on both sides of this had promised or promised sun and crystalline skies. I shrugged. This was the weekend that my friend Carson and I had determined months ago they fit our schedules as parents who work, so this was the weekend we got.
We were on an annual trip that I have been private to think as stupid winter. The stupid inaugural winter was several years ago, when we ski a few miles in the Mount Hood National Forest for camping for a couple of nights, except on the first night someone who will remain without name spilled white gas in the store. After a few hours of stunned sleep, we headed home the next morning.
Our plan this year was to return to Hood, Snowebroeing of Bennett Pass and camping in a place with a great view. I had been waiting for the trip for weeks. Of course, I always look forward to the stupid winter of the way you look forward to free recreational difficulties, but this time my need had a different tenor. Lately I have been feeling a certain dim, for those who share my policy, I don’t think it’s alone in this, and I expected the country to bring some of the stillness that I missed so much, at least for a while. I knew, I knew that asking from one night on a winter storm, so I tried to moderate my expectations. Actually, all I wanted was to see the mountain once, and it would be happy.
The snow went down when Carson and I arrived in Bennett Pass. His batteries weighed the trees around the parking lot. We put our snow rackets and packages and leave. The march was slow and laborious, occasionally a bit treacherous. We follow a path for a few miles and then attack a probable place in the trees. We left a hillside that gave a valley. The mountain had not seen anywhere. Carson vaguely pointed to the north-northeast. “Hood is somewhere there,” he said.
We configure the store, a pyramidal shelter without floor. In the snow we extended plastic sheets and placed our sleeping pads, then we went and took a snow in the snow where we could cook. The sun set a little after 5 pm at 6 pm was good, dark and cold, and the wind had also collected, so we retired to the store. I buried deeply in my two sleeping bags and grew up. I love tents, I love the sounds that I hear through them: the breath of the wind, the silence of the snow that falls. I heard while silence became a brittle pounding: frozen rain. I fell asleep at his light stab.
Around 2 am a fort break I was surprised awake. I thought a tree had fallen into the wind. Maybe we have just evaded death. Then I felt the cold humidity of the synthetic fabric throughout my head and expensive and I realized that the central post had broken and the tent collapsed over us. While holding the store from the inside, Carson heroically crawled from his sleeping bag and went out to look for one of his trekking posts. For her, he hit the broken store post with a piece of spare rope. He tried it. It was held. We went back to sleep.
White gas vapors or not, never sleep especially well with stupid winter, and we both woke up quite early on Saturday. Soon I could hear the stove roaring outside while Carson warmed water. When I finally woke up, the sun had not yet reached above a high crest in the east. The clouds were low and thick over the valley, the trees illuminated dramatically. We drank our coffee distant BOOM of the skiing people who carry out the avalanche control. There is still no mountain, but I saw flow of patches of thinning clouds over us, sometimes completely breaking to give way to blue. Maybe we are lucky.
Around 9 am we start packing. We were going to complete a longer loop with a little climb at the end, so it is better to go. I was putting my sleeping bag in his bag when I looked up and saw, at that time, a touch of summit that looked over a cloud channel. “Hey!” I shouted. “Hood!”
“Hood!” Carson shouted. We leave, shout and jumped in the snow. We could see the two hundred upper feet of the mountain, perhaps more, maybe less. On the beak, the blue sky and the sun. Then, a thicker regime of clouds rolled, and the mountain was gone.
“Hood,” I said again, more for me. I waited to see if the mountain could return, but did not. We finished packing and starting, clicking through the forest, chatting with this and that. The winter world was freshly covered, soft, beautiful. I could feel filling myself with this landscape. Every time there was a clear, I looked where I knew the mountain, hidden behind the clouds. Hood, I thought. Hood, hood, Hood. There, and then not there. There all the time.
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