Having no real direction on where we wanted to go for October turns, Todd and I headed out towards Mt Hood. Initially, We had thought about Bachelor, but it looked pretty slim the night before on the web camera. Timberline was reporting 11 inches of snow, so we decided to give it a go an hoped for the best. The weather was hideous on the drive up I-5, and when we got to Govy, the snow on Hwy. 26 was several inches deep in the road with really bad ruts, and about 12 inches deep on the shoulder. At that point, We didn’t want to attempt driving up the Timberline road (even with the 4 wheel drive), so we decided to pull into the Ski Bowl parking lot and see was up.
The trek up was nice and peaceful and it snowed on us the whole way. There wasn’t anyone around which added to enjoyment factor. The snow depth at midway was around 12 inches, but closer to 16 by the time we were ready to come down. We decided to turn around about 2/3 the way up the summit lift due to the steeper angle of the slope which wasn’t suitable for turns. The turns down were rocky at first on the steeper slope, but were nice and creamy for the remaining 800 or so vertical feet back to the parking lot.
At the lodge, we helped some kids in the parking lot build a jump and we played around on that for awhile. It was nice to see others out enjoying the early snow and having fun. Then, it was time to drive across the highway to have a beer at the Ratskellar and watch a bit of college football before the long boring drive home. Tomorrow should be great up at Timberline!
