How Crowds and Climate Are Impacting Mount Hood

Changes at Elevation

How crowds and climate are endangering Mount Hood’s alpine zone

written by Daniel O’Neil

On a Saturday last May, the climbers’ lot at Timberline Lodge filled by 4 a.m. The first blue skies had arrived after an extended burst of winterlike storms that instantly buried a dismal, stagnated snowpack. Such weather and crowds should have shocked longtime Mount Hood climbers. But this, after all, is the new normal on Oregon’s iconic volcano.

Official numbers don’t exist, but popular opinion calls Mount Hood the most-climbed glaciated peak in the world. An estimated 10,000 people or more clamber up the mountain each year. The commonest way, the southside route, begins at Timberline Lodge, meaning climbers can drive to 6,000 feet and gaze at the 11,240-foot summit from the warmth of their cars. Only the final few thousand feet are technical, requiring crampons and ice axe. But by then a climber stands at 10,000 feet, a precarious place to find oneself in trouble.

Not everyone who attempts Mount Hood comes ready for the challenge. With cell phones offering a new false sense of security, one that lures people deeper into the wilds, many climbers now adventure up mountains as if there were lifeguards on duty, just a 911 call away. As Mount Hood becomes more popular, it becomes more dangerous due to inexperience and to the sheer number of climbers pushing to “bag the peak.”

Christopher Van Tilburg, a rescue mountaineer with the Hood River Crag Rats and Portland Mountain Rescue, serves as medical director for all search and rescue (SAR) missions on Mount Hood. He has skied the mountain since age 5 and first summited it in 1994. The last decade on the mountain has alarmed him.

“We see a lot of people completely unprepared, with not even the minimal amount of gear or skills, who have never even been on a glaciated peak before,” Van Tilburg said. “And they’re climbing Mount Hood as their first mountain.”

To make matters worse, changes brought by a warming climate also complicate safety on Mount Hood. Strange weather, increased rockfall and more exposed hazards like volcanic vents and crevasses have already become more common. Neither climate change nor the crowds are forecast to abate. Awareness and respect for the mountain offer the only path forward.

Christopher Van Tilburg has been a Hood River Crag Rat since 2000, and Crag Rats have worn the black-and-white checkered shirt since the 1920s.

Daniel O’Neil

A decade or two ago, winter climbing on Mount Hood remained the exclusive domain of expert mountaineers. But 2022 started busy for rescuers, including Van Tilburg. April-like weather in January attracted climbers, and Mount Hood’s SAR teams responded to four alpine rescue missions in the month’s final days. On one of those days, Van Tilburg and friends were climbing for fun, despite the unseasonable crowds—“There were probably 200 people on the mountain … in January,” he said—when they received word of a distressed climber on the summit, conveniently just 15 minutes ahead.

“There have been days where we have had trouble finding a place to park, in January, February, March,” Van Tilburg said. “April, May, June,” he continued, laughing. “There are just so many more people on the mountain.”

The Hood River Crag Rats have saved lives and recovered bodies around Mount Hood since 1926. Van Tilburg joined in 2000. Last year, the Crag Rats kept busy with fifty-nine days of rescues: forty-two total missions, twenty-eight of those at or above timberline (from January to November). “This is the most missions we’ve ever had in the alpine and the most number of days we’ve been deployed for the entire year, including missions in the Columbia River Gorge,” he said.

Although only one to two deaths occur each year, Mount Hood has repeatedly proven fatal for even veteran climbers. “That’s always been some of the allure about it,” said Greg Scott, board president of the Mazamas, a climbing and conservation nonprofit founded on Hood’s summit in 1894. “Hood has this reputation for being both accessible and dangerous, so that motivates people to climb it.”

That’s always been some of the allure about it. Hood has this reputation for being both accessible and dangerous, so that motivates people to climb it.

The problem is in the numbers. Too many people try for the summit, and many of them show up without any mountaineering experience. Mazamas climb leaders and even prominent local guide services now refuse to venture up Hood on weekends. Human waste has become an issue in the alpine zone. Worse, because of the rise in numbers, every climber’s safety lies more exposed to risk.

“Hundreds of people going up in a day creates lots of risk factors,” Scott said. “There’s no guarantee that everyone going up has had adequate training or knows exactly what they’re getting into, or is in good physical shape.”

The personal dangers of climbing Mount Hood are as varied as snow types. One slip on a high-angled, icy slope can hurtle a climber into a fumarole or a rock pile, or off a cliff. Deep blue crevasses hide under shallow snow like sharks. Large chunks of rock or ice can bombard climbers, especially when the weather warms. Storms can intensify in minutes, cutting off visibility and ending in hypothermia.

Climbers endanger others as well. A long line of slow climbers delays the ascent and descent, and good timing proves essential in mountaineering. Novices unknowingly kick rocks onto climbers below. And, like a bowling ball, a sliding climber can take out anyone in the fall line.

A 2002 incident on Mount Hood’s south side illustrates the personal and public imperilment involved. One experienced climber, roped to three others, lost footing and all four careened into two more, then three more men from unrelated groups. All nine plunged into the 20-foot-deep “Bergschrund” crevasse at 10,700 feet. Three died. The rescue required helicopter assistance. While evacuating an injured climber, an Air Force Reserve helicopter slammed into the side of the mountain and tumbled down to Crater Rock. Miraculously, no one was killed in the crash.

“Mount Hood can be a mountain that is much less dangerous than day-to-day activities, or it can be a mountain that is extremely dangerous,” Van Tilburg said. “It depends on a lot of factors, but it mostly depends on the human factor.”

Mazamas climb the south side of Mount Hood circa 1970.

Peggy Stone/Mazamas

A new era in outdoor adventure arrived a decade ago: ski mountaineering, backcountry skiing and snowboarding, trail running and hiking. Portland continued to boom with new residents and visitors. In 2013, the Crag Rats’ missions suddenly doubled.

Besides an ever-expanding global population, the proliferation of mountaineering equipment has enabled many climbers to get their hands and feet on lightweight, comfortable gear. The basics for climbing Mount Hood— climbing boots, crampons, an ice axe and helmet—can even be rented at stores in Portland.

“You can get the gear easily, but you have to know how to use it,” said Karly Osten, lead shop technician at the Mountain Shop. Osten has helped eager climbers rent equipment, but she has also professionally guided many trips to the top of Hood. All too well she knows the novices who can’t figure out crampons or have never practiced the survival technique of self-arresting with an ice axe—yet they have seen movies like Fourteen Peaks and assure Osten that friends will help them summit.

“Because Mount Hood is so prominent and close to Portland, and so beautiful, people are like, ‘That’s the mountain I want to climb,’” Osten said. Then, at 10,000 feet, reality crystalizes. “Once they get to the Hogsback area and are looking up Old Chute or the Pearly Gates, they figure, ‘I’ve hiked all this way, and the summit’s just up this steep part, I have to do it. But everyone forgets about the descent. They give it their all on the ascent and get to the top or most of the way and are totally gassed, and then it’s ‘How am I supposed to get down from here?’”

Despite the accessibility of mountaineering gear, Osten has seen people wearing soft hiking boots with crampons falling off. “I saw girls in yoga pants and no helmet up there. You see some stuff and wonder, ‘How do more people not die on this mountain?’ There are so many people that don’t know how close they were to almost falling, and that’s the scary part for me.”

The rise of social media has especially changed the Mount Hood climbing scene. For one thing, copy-cat syndrome makes people think they can, or now have to, climb Hood because so-and-so did. “People can get themselves into trouble pretty quickly taking from the curated social media world,” Scott said.

An insistence on summiting also suffers from social media’s pressure. Never mind potentially hazardous conditions or fatigue. “People are driven to complete the summit goal because they know they have to post, because they’ve already posted about their pre-climb preparations,” Van Tilburg said. “And that’s the first thing people ask: ‘Did you summit?’”

The internet can aid climbers with easy access to weather and snow data. Anyone can glean instant reports on climbing conditions from immediate post-climb social media posts. But inaccurate reports and misinformed sources complicate matters for climbers who fail to evaluate information critically.

Take, for example, the common guideline that Mount Hood must be climbed in the pre-dawn hours, before the sun’s warmth loosens rocks that can hit climbers. According to Van Tilburg, this maxim isn’t always true, or safe. Last summer, two climbers nearly died this way.

“Somebody told them you have to leave at midnight, to summit at 6 a.m. to be off the mountain before the rockfall,” Van Tilburg said. “Both people fell on bullet-proof ice at six in the morning, both were airlifted to Portland trauma hospitals. On each of those missions I skied to the patients at 10,000 feet and never put on crampons, because at noon it was good climbing conditions.”

Climbers ascending Mount Hood.

Mazamas

Like the total number of climbers on Mount Hood, how many people keep their potential rescuers’ lives in mind before heading up remains unknown. The pressure on SAR members and resources is real. “It’s hard to do fifty-nine days of rescues with forty people, when all of us [Crag Rats] are volunteers, and we have jobs and families and leisure activities of our own,” Van Tilburg said. “It’s very rewarding but also very draining.”

Mount Hood’s climbing season used to stretch from March through early July. But today’s highly variable weather patterns and the mountain’s surge in popularity have eliminated any concept of a season. The SAR teams, always alert, foresaw this after rescues doubled in 2013. “We definitely have to keep the pressure on our group to keep recruiting, training and fundraising,” Van Tilburg said.

All last summer, formerly an unpopular time to climb because of low snow and high rockfall, Mount Hood’s SAR teams worked on rescues, some of them complicated. “I did a ski rescue mission in September,” Van Tilburg said. “I don’t know if we’ve ever done that. We don’t do rescues up there in September because there’s usually nobody climbing the mountain.”

Crag Rats and Portland Mountain Rescue members escort a climber down Old Chute on Mount Hood’s popular south-side route in winter.

Christopher Van Tilburg

The U.S. Forest Service hopes to offer more assistance on the mountain they manage. At the start of 2024, a new fee-based permit system will take effect on Mount Hood’s upper alpine wilderness. The required permit will not limit the number of climbers, but it will at least provide more data about who climbs the mountain, when and where.

Revenues will add two more climbing rangers to the mountain, to help inform the general public, especially underprepared climbers, and to coordinate with SAR. Currently, only one seasonal climbing ranger works on Mount Hood.

“Consistently high use, with accompanying climbing accidents and negative impacts to the alpine natural environment, have long needed increased management of the area,” said Ryan Matz, Mount Hood National Forest climbing program manager. “Nearly all of the revenue from this permit system would directly fund our climbing ranger program, providing the financial resources to better manage recreational use and impacts in the alpine upper elevations of Mount Hood.”

Within the climbing community, opinions diverge about the potential pros and cons of a permit. Yet while other Cascade Range peaks like Rainier, Adams and Saint Helens have had fee-based permits for years, Hood, the most climbed of them all, has not.

A pair of Crag Rats admire the view while on a mission on Snowdome, below Anderson Rock, on the remote north side of Mount Hood.

Christopher Van Tilburg

Humans are changing the mountain in more ways than one. “We’ve already passed the point of keeping Oregon the way we know it,” said Anders Carlson, a glaciologist and president/co-founder of the Oregon Glaciers Institute. “The last time the glaciers were stable, and the mountain snowpack, temperatures and everything were happy and in equilibrium was in the early 1980s.”

A volatile climate only makes Mount Hood more dangerous because variability leads to instability, the mountaineer’s bogeyman. Snowpack depth on Hood, historically robust, fluctuates more now, both annually and year-to-year. This opens the potential for fumaroles and crevasses to trap climbers.

In 2022, a warm, dry stretch from January to April left the fumaroles exposed all year, a rarity. One man was seriously injured after falling into the south side’s Devil’s Kitchen fumarole in January, requiring an eight-hour rescue that included Van Tilburg.

Rain-on-snow events, much more common in this warmer climate, can lead to avalanches. While the Northwest Avalanche Center keeps no data on slides along climbing routes, anecdotal evidence suggests an increase. “I’d say avalanche risk is definitely higher, and it’s probably a combination of the changing snowpack and the number of people,” Van Tilburg said.

Alpine safety pays close attention to the temperature threshold: Is it freezing or not? In this warmer climate, rock- and ice-loosening freeze-thaw cycles have become more frequent at higher elevations. Rockfall and icefall, serious mountaineering hazards, now begin earlier in the year and in the day. “Our mountains already have a really bad rockfall problem because they’re giant piles of kitty litter,” Carlson said. “And now we have more water available and more freezing and thawing to make them fall on us.”

New temperature regimes produce a number of consequences on Mount Hood. According to Colby Neuman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Portland, some of these aren’t so bad, at first. A rising freezing level, for example, will produce more snow with higher water content at the higher elevations.

“It can be a mixed bag, where milder temperatures in winter could actually benefit climbers by creating more solid snow bridges across the Bergschrund and crevasses,” Neuman said. “That could be a good thing through March and April, but as we roll into the May-to-July timeframe, warming temperatures could overwhelm that signal and lead to the opposite. Those snow bridges would melt out earlier in the season and make it more dangerous to climb later in the season.”

As the decades go on, the traditional climbing season will have to adjust accordingly. “Melting is one of the big dangers on Hood,” Neuman said. “With a warming climate you can expect the climbing season to move up earlier in the year, for it to end earlier in the summer and it might take longer for it to develop in the fall or early winter. It’s a gradual process.”

The disappearance of snow and ice in places will redirect some climbing routes. Currently, the main glacier along the south-side climbing route, Coalman Glacier, near the summit, looks healthy. Mount Hood’s upper 1,000 to 2,000 feet remain lofty enough to stay cold despite the warming climate.

But glaciologists can no longer define Palmer and Glisan as glaciers because they are gone, cooked. Other glaciers show signs of retreat. On the mountain’s north side, Eliot Glacier has stagnated. Its upper section presents more crevasses than before, which has made travel for climbers and rescuers more dicey.

“Hot high pressure systems are becoming more common, and that’s not good,” Carlson said. “Glaciers in Central Oregon are already doomed. If you want to see what Hood will look like in fifty years, just go look at what North Sister and Middle Sister look like now. In winter you’ll still get snow, but it’ll get more and more unstable, and we’ll have less of an icy top and more of a slush cone. And slush cones are bad for climbing.”

Crag Rats and Portland Mountain Rescue members work on a technical rope mission on Eliot Glacier, at approximately 10,500 feet, on Mount Hood’s northeast flank.

Christopher Van Tilburg

A changed climate requires us to adapt, and a new year-round climbing season proves that climbers already have. The warming trend won’t go away. Neither will the deluge of climbers on Mount Hood, nor the inherent perils associated with mountaineering. “It’s not a matter of whether the mountain is more or less dangerous,” Mazamas president Greg Scott said. “It’s a matter of understanding the risks, and making a decision to climb with eyes wide open.”

Resources exist to help climbers prepare for a summit attempt on Mount Hood. Professional guide services offer the safest way for the inexperienced to reach the summit. The Mazamas hold a Basic Climbing Education Program and an Intro to Alpine Climbing course. Portland Mountain Rescue shares expertise via its website, social media channels, podcasts and lectures at the Mountain Shop. Other Cascade Range peaks provide safer training ground: Adams, Saint Helens, South and Middle Sister, for example.

As changes spread across the mountain, so will climbers. Those who have summited via the standard southside route will seek solace and new terrain on Hood. Rescues will follow. The SAR teams recognize this and are already steps ahead.

“As people get disenchanted with the crowds, they naturally start moving to less crowded places on the mountain, and it puts them into areas that are more remote, dangerous and less traveled,” Van Tilburg said. “It will probably be an issue in the next few years. We’re trying to anticipate that problem by bolstering our equipment and our SAR base on the north side. We can’t let down our guard for one second.”