Last Sunday I went on a ski tour with Wayne and Matt, two guys I know through the portlandhikers.org forum (where they go by Koda and Water). It was my first time hiking with either of them, though I had met Wayne a couple of times before, and also it was my first time skiing in the backcountry. I’ve done a fair amount of resort skiing but that’s quite a different experience. Wayne has been doing this for years and showed me the ropes.

Here is the track I recorded with my GPS unit that day. It says 7.99 miles and ~3220′ EG if you feel like believing it.

Avalanche danger was reported as “considerable” — in fact, a guy in another party not too far from us was involved in an avalanche and hurt his knee and shoulder but fortunately survived — so we picked from a couple of routes that Wayne knew to be pretty safe on avalanche-prone days. We still examined the conditions in the field (pictures of that below).

The batteries died on my GoPro before we skied any downhill, and I tried to film one run with my camera but it’s a bit hard to watch. Here are a couple clips anyway.

We started at the Hood River Meadows lot, leaving my car at about 8:30. It’s about ~2.5 miles to get up to the top of Elk Mountain where we want to ski. We crossed a couple of snow bridges. Wish I’d gotten a picture of the second one because it was more scary looking.

Not sure why this tree has these marks.

Matt and Wayne broke the trail the whole day. They are faster than I am

Near the top there is a burned area. Actually we’ll be skiing down among burned trees too.

We have reached the top of Elk Mountain, and now we are getting ready to ski down the slope you see in front of us.

Wayne digs a test pit…

…while Matt stands around looking cool.

Here Wayne has exposed the profile of the snowpack. You can see the 2 feet of fresh powder on top of previous sun-crusted layers. He showed us some cool things like how to make test hits on the top of the snowpack and see how the layers beneath react.

Some sunny haze.

The snowpack seemed to be in good (safe) condition, so we took the skins off our skis and started down. This was great! Despite going skiing dozens of times before, I’ve spent very little time skiing powder. This was 2 feet of fresh powder. No tracks, nobody around, no noise of the chairlifts in the background. Just pretty silence. Now it makes more sense why people choose to put in all this extra work instead of just riding a lift!

I went into this trip thinking “the downhill will be no big deal, I’ve done that plenty of times before and I know how to ski.” I did not realize how much harder it can be to turn in deeper snow… or, at least, how much harder it is to make controlled, tight turns. It was still manageable but I could feel that my form was terrible. I had to pick wider openings in the trees to make my turns because I didn’t always trust myself to make a good turn right in front of a tree.

We skied down maybe 700-800 vertical feet and stopped for a bit of a lunch. Wayne told us more about the area and how it’s possible to ski down 2000 vertical feet to the highway. Matt informed me about the differences between Ravens and Crows. (I think I like Ravens better)

After eating for a while we skinned back up to the top of Elk Mountain, finding, to our surprise (and Wayne’s surprise especially), that someone had already established a set of ascending tracks after we had skied down. We hadn’t expected to see anybody else out there, but we actually encountered two other parties on skis that day.

Back at the top of Elk Mountain, we could see Adams poking through the trees. The weather turned out to be clearer than we might have expected.

From here we planned to make another run down what we had just skied and then to travel along Bluegrass Ridge to the north. So, we traversed to a slightly different spot on the top of the bowl, pointed our skis downhill and made some new tracks in a slightly steeper area.

After another skin up to the top of Elk Mountain, we turned north and followed Bluegrass Ridge.

A view looking back into the bowl we had just been skiing.

It turned out to be a gorgeous afternoon and we enjoyed some great views as we skinned up Bluegrass Ridge.

Wayne and Matt arriving at the summit of Mt. Everest

Pretty mountain, nice clouds.

Now we are getting close to the high point (I think) of Bluegrass Ridge and we are about to ski down on the left, toward Mt. Hood and Elk Meadows.

One more closeup of the volcano:

And if dead things can bask, these are.

Below us you can see our next destination, Elk Meadows.

This snow was not quite as nice as before. It was a little icy on top, and just kind of scrapey in general. But it was still fun to ski.

Matt skis:

At the bottom of the slope we put our skins back on and skied through some forest until we hit Elk Meadow. There is a shelter there. It’s a nice view of Hood too.

We skied across the meadow, heading back in the direction of my car, and toward the setting sun.

One thing I learned on this trip is that when you’re on a ski tour, the general rule is that you should always ski toward the sun.

(not really, don’t do that!)

From here we had just a little bit of elevation to gain before meeting with our tracks from earlier in the day. There was another downhill run — kind of tricky for me, as my legs were getting tired and there were quite a few trees and narrow spots.

I was using a pair of Wayne’s skins that day, and had them stuffed in my jacket for the descent.  I didn’t zip up my jacket far enough and one of the skins decided to bail at some point. At the bottom I realized I was short a skin… hiked back up a short way to see if I could find it, but no luck. Bummer! Skiing back to the car over some gentle ups and downs was interesting with only my right ski skinned. Like pushing a skateboard sometimes. It wasn’t entirely bad on the downhills because I could put more weight on my left ski and glide farther than normal, but progress was slow on the uphills.

We made it back to the car just as it was getting pretty dark. Sometime after 6, I guess. If we had been out another 5-10 minutes I would have had to put on my headlamp. We packed up our stuff and stopped at the Ratskeller bar in Government Camp to fill up our gut tanks before heading home.

Thanks to Matt and Wayne for an awesome first day of backcountry skiing, and especially to Wayne for showing me the ropes and ensuring a safe outing!

Well it isn’t exactly a hiking trip report, but I might as well make an update.

I woke up Friday, 11/16 feeling sick with a headache & general achiness, and developed some chills and a fever. Called in sick to work for the first time and stayed home. I felt sick that whole weekend which was a bummer because I had to miss the monthly SAR training outing — this month they were teaching orienteering, shelter-building, fire building/maintenance, and other good stuff like that.

When Monday came around I felt fine, and I worked Monday-Wednesday just feeling mildly sick. At nights I was having trouble sleeping and getting night sweats, which I had never had before. Then starting on Thursday (Thanksgiving), I started getting a fever (103°F +) and some serious chills… taking acetaminophen helped these symptoms somewhat but as soon as it wore off my fever would shoot up again. By Friday I was getting dehydrated and I could do little more than lie in bed shaking, feeling dizzy when I sat/stood up, with my head pounding and heart racing. By Saturday morning I was researching my symptoms online and was getting nervous that I might have endocarditis — a bacterial blood infection that grows on disturbed tissue in the heart (I’m at a higher risk of this because of my heart valve transplants). Later that morning Ginny took me to urgent care. They ruled out the flu and a couple other things, couldn’t find anything wrong with me and said that if my fever came back I should go to the ER. We went out for breakfast and when I got home my temperature went from normal to 103.4 in less than an hour. The chills made my whole body convulse and I lost my breakfast too.

Soon Ginny was driving me to the ER. I was admitted there pretty quickly with a fever of 101+ (and that’s directly after drinking some water), 130s heart rate, blood pressure of something like 95/47. They put 3 liters of fluid in me and started doing some tests — blood cultures, lumbar puncture to check for meningitis, asking me lots of questions to try to figure things out. By the end of the night my condition had stabilized somewhat and they hadn’t found any answers so they sent me home.

The next morning I got a call from a doctor saying that my blood cultures appeared to be growing some bacteria already and we needed to go back to the ER right away. So, we went in, and thus began our 3-night hospital stay. They hooked me up to some IV antibiotics right away to start combating the blood infection. On the previous day at the ER, I didn’t really receive good care… I don’t know if they didn’t take me seriously or what. But they were not checking my vitals or watching me very closely when they should have been. This time, it was a steady stream of doctors and nurses coming in and out of my room coordinating tests and gathering info.

I guess I could go into a lot more detail about what the days in the hospital were like, but I’ll get to the important details. Basically my self-diagnosis of endocarditis was correct. I had 2 CT scans, an X-ray, and a TEE (Transesophageal Echocardiogram) to check me out. The bug turned out to be Streptococcus Mitis, a common bacteria that lives in your mouth. It probably entered my bloodstream when I brushed my teeth, and I was unlucky enough to have it take up residence in my pulmonary valve (which was inserted last year… it’s actually a valve from a cow’s neck).

They put me on a 6-week home IV antibiotic program to clear up the infection. I have a PICC line (Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter) which is basically an IV that goes in my arm and travels almost all the way to my heart, so that the drugs will go straight into the main part of my bloodstream. PICC lines can stay in for months without needing to be replaced, unlike a common IV. My more recent blood cultures are already coming back negative, but there is a chance that there’s some kind of abscess or bacterial vegetation in my heart and the antibiotics won’t be able to clear it up. So for now I am waiting for these 6 weeks of antibiotics to be over, and then when I go off them, basically if my blood cultures stay negative I’m clear — otherwise if there’s still evidence of an infection I’ll need open heart surgery to remove the infected valve.

I want to say thanks first and foremost to my wife Ginny, who is a nurse (at OHSU) and has dropped everything to provide me with excellent care and companionship for the last week. Thanks also to my mom and dad also visited a lot in the hospital and helped out, and Ginny’s mom & brother & sister-in-law who watched Bombadil while we were at the hospital. Thanks to my other friends & family too, who visited me and supported me with kind words Hopefully the antibiotics will take care of all this and it will be fine.

-Joe

Just some pics from this one! The route is nicely described here if you want to try it. I got a nice sunny October day for this hike thanks to our extended summer.

Sometime shortly after joining the portlandhikers.org forum, I came across a trip report from a guy going by the name of “cascadehiker” describing the annual one-day circumnavigation of Mt. Hood he does with his dad every year (see that report here). The full loop is right around 40 miles, but they take a shortcut that makes it more like 36-37 miles and 9000 feet elevation gain… and their total time last year was less than 15 hours. As a new hiker I was blown away by reports like this one. What kind of person do you have to be in order to hike that far in a day? Who are these people and how did they get to be so amazing? Do I have the ability to work up to such feats too, coming from a history of heart problems like I do?

I wouldn’t have guessed then that less than a year later I would successfully complete the loop myself, joining cascadehiker and 6 other maniacs from portlandhikers.org. It took me longer than CH and his dad (15:53 vs 14:49, and they had an icy day) but I was happy to have completed the hike with no injuries, no blisters, and no mental breakdowns!

Our plan was to get to Timberline Lodge and start hiking by 5:00 AM. Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of the day was the fact that 8 dudes successfully woke up in the 2:00 hour, drove and carpooled from 8 different locations to Timberline, got their stuff together, and actually started hiking at 5:00 AM sharp as planned! I rode with Jim, a guy who lives quite close to me and recently completed a 100 mile run; we picked up Doug in Portland, and met Adam, Eric, Guy, Mark, and Sean at the lodge. Others know us by our PH names: theradpotato, cornelius, Chase, cascadehiker, Eric Peterson, Guy, mayhem, and Sean Thomas. You can see the portlandhikers trip report for our hike (written by Eric) here.

Here is a link to a GPS track of our route (from Guy’s GPS, I believe).

To save weight on this hike, I brought my point-and-shoot Panasonic instead of the DSLR. Sometimes I wished I had the bigger camera but overall I think it was the right choice.

Some of the guys getting ready. If you’ve never seen the Timberline Lodge parking lot at 4:54 AM, here’s your chance.

So, we started the loop heading East from Timberline Lodge at 5:00, following the trail with headlamps. It was hard to tell in the low light but we were kicking up a lot of dust and breathing it in. Soon we got to the first river crossing, the White River, where most of us got our feet wet. Mine stayed dry but only because others had thrown rocks in the middle to use as stepping stones! After this we made pretty good time on the climb up to Mt. Hood Meadows, a ski resort I frequented growing up. Sunrise was in full force now and I fell behind most of the other guys taking pictures in the glorious light. I’d never been to Meadows without the moving lifts, several feet of snow, and thousands of other skiers/snowboarders, so revisiting the places I know so well – but this time snowless, verdant, quiet, and deserted – was a surreal experience.

Hiking into the sunrise

The funny thing about round-the-mountain hikes is that even though you’re not trying to climb up to any peak, and ideally you would stay at the same level and traverse all the way around, you can end up going through quite a bit of elevation change. Look at Mt. Hood in Google Earth and you’ll see all the ridges and canyons radiating down from the top of the mountain; well, you have to go down into each canyon and up over each ridge if you want to go all the way around. That’s how you get 9000 feet of elevation gain on a hike that doesn’t really have a high point as its objective.

An early view of Hood

I think the section starting at Mt. Hood Meadows was the most beautiful part of the hike in terms of wildflowers. We also got to go by a neat waterfall or two.

After crossing Clark Creek and Newton Creek we ascended to Lamberson Butte/Gnarl Ridge. This might be my favorite part of the loop. The trail goes up the ridge for a while, affording some awesome views.

We continued hiking northward around the mountain and crossed many snowfields. When we arrived at Cooper Spur shelter we took one of the longer breaks for the day, eating some food and taking pictures. The shelter was pretty cute.

The ridge going up on the left is Cooper Spur, I think. The greatest thing about hiking around a mountain is seeing it from all angles… it’s such a visible measure of your progress.

Next we came to the Eliot Glacier crossing, probably the biggest unknown of the day. The trail on the west side of the canyon washed out several years ago and has yet to be replaced; many have speculated on the best alternative route. I didn’t get any good photos of this part, but we fanned out and Guy directed us straight up the steep section of loose scree. I actually found this section to be quite good fun. It was all a balancing act, requiring quick corrective movements when the ottoman-sized rock you trusted to be stable starts shifting down the hill.

On the far (west) side of the canyon, we descended the ridge but lost the trail. A quick bushwhack got us back to the Timberline Trail.

Creeks like this one create little pockets of flowers and vegetation along a route that can be pretty dry otherwise.

Here’s a view looking out at part of the Dollar Lake fire that happened last year.

EP crossing a creek

Mt. Hood from a Loraxian meadow

By now we were about halfway around, I think. The trail took us through some of the Dollar Lake burn. Forest fires are scary and stuff, but actually I find the burned areas interesting to hike through. It amazes me that there can sometimes be a blackened, amputated tree 10 feet away from a tree that does not appear to be burnt at all. Why didn’t the fire spread between those two trees? Did a sudden downpour stop the fire just before it could reach the next tree? Finding signs of new life is fun too.

We followed the trail through Cairn Basin and Wy’East Basin. Seeing the north side of Mt. Hood was something I’d wanted to do for a couple years, so I was excited to be there. In fact all of the hikes I’d done on Hood so far were between McNeil Point and Timberline Lodge, so most of the day was spent in territory that was new to me.

The official Timberline Trail extends outward from the mountain for a considerable distance along the ridge between Bald Mountain and McNeil Point, only to return via a nearly parallel route. Adam and his dad developed a shortcut route that cuts off a good 3-4 miles from the day’s total miles. The trade-off is that you have to perform a downhill bushwhack that loses about 1000 feet in 0.3 mile! It was so steep in places that my shoes didn’t have enough traction to keep from sliding downhill, and I had to cling to tree branches or try to selectively surf into foot holds that would stop my slide. All in all it was exciting, but we’d already hiked quite a few miles by that point so I think it was hard on most of us.

After some relatively flat and forested miles we made it to Ramona Falls. It’s a nice spot and there were many day hikers hanging out in the area.

I tried Salmonberries for the first time on this trip, another berry which is not exactly “edible” but not poisonous either, and some Huckleberries when I saw them.

Next comes probably the most physically challenging section of the hike. The trail crosses the Sandy River, which I believe is the low point of the entire loop, and then climbs 2,200 feet or so up the next ridge. Fortunately at this point my knees were feeling good, and I didn’t have any blisters, but my energy stores were getting depleted or something and it became a mental struggle to just pick a good pace and stick with it. My mind seems to use music as a coping mechanism. I’ve noticed on longer hikes I tend to get one or two songs stuck in my head the entire trip. Sometimes it’s something annoying like “Joy to the World” (are you serious, brain???) but this time it was a pretty good one at least: Kliment – Ether Aesthetics

Here’s a pic from the bottom:

And another shot an hour later from a viewpoint about 1400′ higher:

By this time the sun was setting. The smoky atmosphere made the sunlight very red. Computer monitors all show things differently, but if you happen to have yours calibrated exactly as mine is, the color of this sunlight should be pretty accurate! This crazy sun…

… was filtering through the trees making vivid red patches all around me:

From the top of that climb from the Sandy, it was relatively flat over to the section below Paradise Park, where I’d been just several days before. By this point we had all started hiking at our own paces and I was alone, almost at the back of the pack. I felt like I was in the home stretch and I relaxed a bit more, feeling good.

The trail goes down into one last significant canyon – Zigzag canyon. The trail bottoms out at about 4800′ before climbing back up to the Lodge at 6000′. So after 30+ miles and 8000′ elevation gain I had a few more miles and another 1000′ climb to look forward to. Honestly the sunset is what propelled me up that last climb… I wanted to get to a place where I could see the views and take a few pictures. It’s just so much better at sunset and sunrise! In fact, of the 130 photos I took on this trip, less than half of them were taken in the full daylight hours that dominated our hike.

I had a hard time keeping a good pace because I couldn’t keep my eyes on the trail. I felt so fortunate to have had this experience. Not a lot of people get to do this kind of thing and see such beautiful sights. But, it was getting dark and I had to get back to the lodge, so I turned my back on the views and kept going. In a while I heard Eric behind me and he sounded upset… I waited for him, and it turns out his batteries were dying on his headlamp, so we completed the rest of the hike with the light from my little micro-LED.

I think I made it back to the car at 8:53, where most of the other guys had been waiting for 30-45 minutes. We celebrated our success briefly and then drove home in our various states of exhaustion. A quick stop at a convenience store provided enough coffee and junk food to stay awake for the drive home.

There are a limited number of days left for normal (non-snow) hiking on Mt. Hood; get up there for a hike in the next week or two if you can! Weather’s been great!

Diamond Peak is an 8,744′ shield volcano in the Cascade range, southeast of Eugene. My friend Jesse had been trying to climb it for a little while but kept getting thwarted by all kinds of problems ranging from car troubles to ill-fated bushwhacks. This time I came along as his good luck charm, hoping we would finally get to the summit.

Diamond Peak isn’t an exceptionally difficult climb itself; the challenge is that the approach (at least from Odell Lake) is a good 10-15 miles, so if you wanted to do it in a day you’d be hiking 20+ miles on top of the climb up to the summit. We chose to leave Portland on Saturday afternoon at about 4:00, which got us to the Cascade Station trailhead at about 7:20. Jesse had left the car and already crossed the train tracks while I was still getting my stuff together, and he started shouting “hurry, there’s a train coming!” so I grabbed my backpack and trekking poles and ran to the other side of the train tracks to avoid delaying our start… and I managed to cross in time to avoid getting stuck behind a ~15-car passenger train that took 30 seconds to go by

Here’s a map of our route. (“P” for parking, “1″ where we camped)

Trapper Creek along the way:

It’s 5 or 6 miles to Diamond View lake, and maybe 8 miles to a heart-shaped lake. We planned to go as far as we could before it got too dark. So we walked quickly to Diamond View lake, where it was already basically dark, and since Jesse and his girlfriend had previously set up a nice campsite a ways off-trail, we decided to camp there.

Arriving at Diamond View Lake:

We built a fire (not close to the shore) and sat around for about 3 hours before going to bed in our hammocks. Though we built the fire just for fun, it ended up getting sort of chilly and its warmth was quite welcome. I used my 1/4″ Gossamer Gear pad (under-insulation for the hammock) as a reclining pad near the fire, with a log as a backrest. I strapped my camera to a tree and made a timelapse of our campground for the duration of the fire, taking 20-second exposures every 25 seconds. I’m working on a timelapse compilation that I will release at the end of the year

Jesse setting up his hammock in the dark:

Moonlight!

Stars

Eventually it was after 1 AM and it was bedtime. I wasn’t quite warm enough to be comfortable but I was fine. In the morning my thermometer read 35°F… I was expecting it to stay above 50! The lake was all steamy in the morning:

We hit the trail at 8:00 AM. We had several miles to go to the base of Diamond Peak, including a bushwhack between our trail and the PCT. To call it a bushwhack is a bit of an overstatement because there weren’t really any bushes to whack. It was easy. But before the bushwhack we passed by “Heart-shaped Lake” and the generically named “Mountain Creek”:

We hit the PCT and followed it south to where Jesse had marked our departure from it. There is not an official trail up the south side (as far as I know), but there was supposed to be a fairly obvious use path. So we got to that bend in the trail and started heading up.

What we did NOT realize at the time is that our point of departure from the PCT was about 20 feet past the (very well cairned, very obvious) beginning of the use path to the summit. We just blew right by it like a couple of morons. Because of this, we ascended Diamond Peak too far west. It still worked out fine, and the topography of the area is such that as long as you’re going uphill you’ll make it to an obvious high point that leads directly to the summit, but it would have saved us some time and energy if we’d taken the normal route!

For future reference! If you get here:

Look behind you and you will see this (2 cairns):

Anyway, we started climbing. Some of the off trail work:

Before too long we found ourselves at the top. The views weren’t bad, but it was pretty smoky from some forest fires, so the normal peaks weren’t visible. One really weird thing is that the wind would shift multiple times per minute from being warm and balmy to pretty chilly, and back again. There were 2 humans and 1 dog at the top who had arrived there just a couple minutes before we did, coming from the West ridge, and we took pictures of each other at the top of the peak and rested for a minute.

Jesse took this one:

Goal accomplished, but quite a few miles left to travel for the day. Coming from the top the use trail was obvious and we had little problem following it all the way down to the PCT. We decided to avoid any further bushwhacks, in the interest of not bushwhacking anymore, and hiked on the PCT past several very pretty lakes. We didn’t take many breaks on this section because we just wanted to get back to the car before dark. There was a quite colorful sunset due to the smoke from the forest fires, but we never had a very clear shot of it unfortunately. It did filter through the trees nicely to accentuate any reddish or orange color.

We went to the train tracks and took them straight back to the car. Managed to make it back before it got so dark that we had to turn our lights on.

Now the real challenge awaited us: driving home after a 25 mile weekend and staying awake!!! We stopped in Eugene for some burgers and by the time I got to Albany I was fading fast. Napped at the rest area. My state of alertness was further enhanced by a cop who was kind enough to pull me over for going 71 in a 60 zone; fortunately he let me go without even so much as a warning.

In general this whole hike was beautiful. I really liked the forest around there. The PCT section was gorgeous… nice lakes, tons of lichens and other neat plants. I want to go back and camp there for sure. Try it out if you get the chance.