Adam Schneider's
digital photos

July 19, 2005: The starting point for Cooper Spur trail is the Cloud Cap Campground at 5850', which is 11 miles (and 3000 vertical feet) up a truly awful gravel road from Highway 35. The ascent from the trailhead went according to plan, past the stone shelter at 6800' to the "end of the trail" at 8514'. I continued to Tie-In Rock and even a little beyond, to the very edge of the snowfields (almost 9000') below the summit of Mt. Hood (which is 11,249'). Overall, the trail is a little monotonous once you get above timberline -- with the exception of the places where you have to cross patches of snow -- but it's worth doing at least once because this is the highest you can get on Mt. Hood without climbing gear.

The way down was a bit of an adventure. I took a shortcut trail that went down steeply along the top of Eliot Glacier's moraine instead of switchbacking broadly across the spur, which was all well and good. But I was keeping an eye out for a "climber's trail along the edge of the moraine" that I'd heard of, and I thought they meant the bottom edge of the moraine. Oops. So I followed what I thought was a trail down, and by the time I'd realized my mistake, I was too far down to go back up, and it turned out there was no decent trail down in the glacier's outwash plain. I had to clamber over a lot of loose boulders and muddy snow until I found a part of the slope where the rocks looked big enough to support me, and I finally made it back up to the top -- where I found the trail I'd been trying to get to in the first place.