The south side route on Wy’east rises about +5300’ of elevation gain over just 3 miles, the first two miles are in a ski resort on groomed cat tracks (deluxe!) and the final 500’ heads up a beautiful headwall. We climbed the Old Chute on this trip because conditions this year make the regular route through the Pearly Gates impassable.
Alex and I took advantage of the start of a long window of beautiful weather to head down and get a second attempt in on Mt Hood. Our first attempt several years ago had us turn around a few hundred feet short of the summit in pretty poor wet loose conditions. This time, we got up a bit earlier to make sure we would get to the summit headwall before the sun hit it.
After wandering around for fifteen minutes at four in the morning trying to figure out if there’s a bathroom I could use I eventually gave up, pooped in a wag bag, and then Alex and I started heading up in the dark. The first two hours were a quiet heads-down climb on the groomed cat track and up onto the Palmer Glacier. Once the sun came up we paused for snacks and water and because of the icy early conditions we had to take off our skis for better traction. Fortunately, Hood gets a LOT of traffic and we followed a well set boot track most of the way to the summit.
The upper headwall was chaotic with about two dozen people below, on, or above the various chutes available to climb. We tried to avoid other people by taking our own line off to the side and avoided a variety of comical and scary situations. We saw: one person fall over in a chute and let go of their ice axes, one person slide back down the bottom of the chute, several people complain about the constant hail of snow other people were kicking down from above, and so on. Hood can be quite the scene apparently! Around 10 we summitted and enjoyed the incredible views looking north toward Rainier, Adams, and Helens, and to the south toward Jefferson and the Three Sisters.
After some more snacking and gummies we took some time looking to see whether we could ski off the summit proper, but conditions forced us to downclimb the top 50’ of our ascent route.
We transitioned to skis in a side chute that shuold have been free of climbers coming up, but some unfortunate climber insisted on coming straight up towards us even though the chute we were in had no exit at the top. We gave them some time to make better decisions but eventually had to head down raining a small avalanche of snow on them. About twenty minutes later we were back at the chairlifts, where Alex insisted we take one extra free lap to take advantage of the phenomenal ski conditions. It felt pretty well deserved. On the way home we tried out the first Washington In-n-Out which although ridiculously busy is entirely unchanged from the ones in California.
