Timberline Trail
Mt. Hood is a magical place. Every trip to Mt. Hood has been a special occasion for me.
I visited Mt. Hood for the first time in August 2020, and seeing the hand-crafted artwork inside the Timberline Lodge was spectacular. In November 2021, we stayed two nights at the Timberline Lodge, where I did my first ever solo backcountry skiing runs (staying inside the resort terrain before the ski season began, it was safe). In May 2022 we summitted Mt. Hood through the Pearly Gates and skied down, which has been one of, if not, the most aesthetic lines I've skied.
Returning to the Pacific Northwest this summer, Wade and I wanted to make a road trip centered around our primary objective, riding Seattle to Portland. We considered other activities we were both interested in (such as biking McKenzie pass, potentially summitting one of the Cascade volcanoes), and we decided on doing the Timberline Trail as it was the best option since we did not want to backpack and also wanted to avoid glaciated terrain. The Timberline Trail is a 40-mile, 10,000ft vert trail that circumnavigates Mt. Hood and is one of the prettiest hikes I have ever done.
Training
Since this run was done around the same time as when we trained for the Seattle to Portland bike ride, a lot of the aerobic endurance was achieved through long bike rides. One week before our road trip, we did a 20 mile trail run in the Mt. Tam watershed to test our running legs. Based on the run, we felt it was better to do Timberline Trail after STP instead of our original plan of before, which turned out to definitely be the right call.
Though the Timberline trail is often done as a multi-day backpacking trip, we wanted to test the frontiers of our endurance. I had done the Cactus to Clouds hike which is a 10,000 ft hike, and last summer I ran the Broken Arrow skyrace in Tahoe, which was 25 miles / 8,500 ft. I felt that extrapolating an extra 15 miles from my previously longest trail run would be reasonable.
The Timberline Trail
We did dispersed camping near Trilium Lake the night before and after.
Prior to the hike, we had some decisions to make:
- Where to start? There are many trailheads with access to the Timberline Trail, however without question the best place to start and end is the Timberline Lodge, where you have good road access and a day lodge to use before the hike.
- When to start? As we had ridden Seattle to Portland two days before, we wanted to get enough sleep the night before, and as the summer days in the PNW are so long, we set a 4:30am alarm. We ended up starting the hike around 6am and finished at 10:30pm, with the last hour in the dark. In hindsight, starting a bit earlier would've been better.
- Clockwise or Counter-Clockwise? There are two orientations for doing the Timberline Trail. At first we thought clockwise would be better to minimize time in sun and heat. After chatting with my friend Chris who did the trail previously, he recommended going CCW since the section between Timberline Lodge and the white river is very sandy, and it would be much better to do it as a descent rather than ascent. Going CCW was definitely the right decision, mainly on this point.
- Wilderness Permits The Timberline Trail doesn't have a quota system, however hikers are asked to fill in wilderness permits. We couldn't find the forms to fill in at the Wy'East day lodge. However at the Cloud Cap trailhead (mile 15 CCW), Bald Mountain shelter (mile 26), and near the end of the trail (~mile 40) there were permit stations. This set up is not ideal for one-day CCW runners.
Nutrition We underestimated the difficulty of the hike, as I ate almost all of my food on the trail. Drinking water is not an issue on the hike as there are many streams and snow (in July). I ended up drinking 8L of water and eating 3-4000 calories.
Gear We brought hiking poles, which turned out to be critical for river crossings. I used iodine pills to filter water, but I would probably buy water filters so I don't need to carry extra water weight while the iodine pills process the water.
The Trail We started at 6am and headed in a counter-clockwise direction. Either way you head, you begin the trail with a descent (and end with an ascent).
There are multiple river crossings, and doing this trail in mid July was pretty challenging. The time of day affects the difficulty of the river crossing as snowmelt increases throughout daylight.
The east side of Mt. Hood is drier than the west side, as it sits in the mountain's rain shadow. You can notice the difference in flora, with drier plants on the east side which receives less snowfall in the winter. The trail reaches its peak elevation at about 7300ft around mile 13, shortly before the campsite in the photo above. We also took a slight detour off the Timberline trail to follow the Eliot Moraine trail, which follows the ridge of the moraine offering spectacular views of Mt. Hood's largest glacier.
Unfortunately climate change is real in 2024 and things are only getting worse. Reading research papers shows that the glacial loss in the first 20 years of the 21st century is almost the same amount as all of the 20th century.
We had lunch around the 21 mile mark. During the first half of the hike, we only encountered 8 people and 1 dog. We saw a total of 73 people and 3 dogs during the whole hike, as most people were seen during the second half. Most of Oregon's population is on the western side of Mt. Hood in the Willamette Valley, so maybe the trailheads are more popular towards the west.
The western portion of the hike is also at lower elevation in general, providing more shade which was very nice in the afternoon. The beauty of the Timberline Trail is in its diverity of climate and terrain, as we descended into more of a temperate rainforest.
Some parts of the trail were quite well maintained and popular, however there were also other parts with fallen trees that required some crawling and squatting to get around.
We reached Ramona Falls around 6pm, nearing the lowest elevation of the trail. The Sandy River Crossing turned out to be the hardest crossing of the day, as we crossed around the hottest time of the day. For most of the previous crossings, we could find rocks to step on so only our feet and shoes would get mildly wet (and would dry off in the following miles), but for this we could not find rocks and eventually committed to stepping into the bottom of the river, around an ankle high depth.
On a side note, hiking in wet shoes wasn't too uncomfortable, however I did get some blisters by the end of the hike due to my feet being wet. My shoes and socks also smelled horribly after the hike; I washed my shoes in the washing machine afterwards to clean the gear.
We reached our car at 10:30pm, exhausted but also feeling very accomplished! As our first times completing a 50k trail run, it felt very satisfying. I may have also opened the can of worms to do more trail runs. Maybe Rae Lakes will be next :)
Other Resources
The post from HikingGuy was very helpful.
Here is my strava recording. I would not fully recommend following this GPX track as we took some detours finding the river crossings.