Mom, Mt. Hood, and my route to the Mazamas

by Peter Boag

As I cleared the crater-rim of Oregon’s South Sister at 10 a.m. on July 13, 2018, varied emotions swept over me. First, there was the excitement of being steps away from the summit of a glaciated peak that finally qualified me to join the Mazamas. I had grown up in Oregon, had early fallen in love with the Cascade Mountains, had backpacked and hiked and skied in the region’s outdoors even as a child, and had long been familiar with the Mazamas. Over those years, I often considered doing what I needed to do in order to join.

But I had never previously been particularly interested in climbing. My motivations for that had only recently changed. They were connected to the second reason why summitting the South Sister was emotional for me. It was exactly 70-years and two days since my mother, Olga Horand, had successfully ascended Mt. Hood as a fifteen-year-old. That feat had always been one of the major adventure stories in my family. Growing up, we kids would often ask about it. Mother always included in her telling two details apparently most memorable to her. The most vivid concerned being roped up with others during the last steep pitch to the summit. The fellow in line behind her was quite anxious, fearing he would fall and be swept away. Apparently, he let everyone know. Mother always spoke of that with a mixture of comedy and annoyance.

I thought about Mom quite a bit during my trek up the South Sister—a climb not nearly so technical as Mt. Hood, but a mountain whose summit reaches toward the heavens to an elevation that approaches the latter’s height. I had lost my mother the previous October; she had suffered Alzheimer’s in her later years. I was thankful that even toward the end she still recognized me, though on occasion she did mix me up with my father. He had passed away four years earlier. During my climb, I felt I was finally doing something similar in scale to what she had done—the ascent to higher altitudes was bringing me closer to her. I would like to believe that it was doing so in more than just my thoughts.

Both my parents enjoyed the outdoors. Mom was more of a mountain person while my father loved the Coast and salmon fishing. I spent a lot of time as a child in both places, but I took more to Mom’s mountains. Both my parents facilitated my interest in backpacking when I was in grade school in the early 1970s. They enrolled me in a backpacking course through the Portland Public Park system to learn all about it. They both, though my mom more, then accompanied me on varied backpacking trips, including the Timberline Trail around Mt. Hood.

My mom’s love of the mountains came by way of downhill skiing, which she began doing as a girl. Her father bought her skis from the army surplus store in Portland just as World War II was concluding. Many a weekend during the ski season, Mom,

Above: Olga Horand Mt. Hood, 1948. Photo: unknown continued on next page

Mom, continued from previous page.

sometimes with a friend, would make her way across town by streetcar from her parents’ home on northeast Dekum Street to St. Mary’s Academy in downtown. There she would climb aboard the old rattle-trap of a bus that the school had arranged for transporting youngsters up to Mt. Hood during the wintertime. She sometimes even spent the night at the dormitory in Government Camp, and thus skied all weekend long.

On March 28, 1949, Mom even participated in the Oregon Journal’s Safe Ski Slalom competition held at Government Camp. “All the other girls missed the curve at the bottom of the run,” my mom once explained to me for my family history collection, “but I was the first one to make it. The officials decided to change the course [after that] because the kids were having such a difficult time. They asked me if I wanted to go again, but I said ‘no.’ I was just glad to make it and I was so nervous.” Newspaper coverage of the event verifies that “more than half of the field tumbled along the route.” Mom placed sixth in the junior women’s division—at least according to the newspaper, while her diary states that she was fifth. She wore bib number 30 that day. It is a memento of her past that I still hold onto. That she kept it all those years suggests how important skiing was to her.

After Mom and Dad married in 1950, she let go of skiing. Perhaps it was too expensive for a young couple just starting out. Perhaps it was because it was never really my dad’s thing. Perhaps it was because of the time Mom needed to devote to five children who began arriving in 1952 and continued coming until 1966. But after the two eldest children left home, Mom could wait no longer. In 1973, she outfitted us three younger kids with ski equipment, enrolled us in lessons at Timberline Lodge, and then took off for the solitude of the slopes. She kept skiing for the next quarter-century or more, until arthritis advancing in her hip simply made it too difficult. It became one of those important parts of her life that, like all of us who experience both the privilege and pain of aging, have to let go of at one time or another. Of all the children, I was the only one who continued skiing for some years. While I was in graduate school in Eugene, my parents even gifted me my first set of cross-country skis.

All these things and connections to my mother led me into the mountains. But more than anything, it was my mother’s ascent of Mt. Hood that led me up the South Sister and then into the Mazamas. Her opportunity to climb Oregon’s highest peak was due to my grandfather’s work. He was a baker—a trade he learned in his native Switzerland—and worked for many years as such on the top floor of the Meier & Frank department store in downtown Portland. Back in those days, the store sponsored varied activities for its employees and their families. In 1948 the store’s ski club, called SKIMF, contracted with two men calling themselves the “Mt. Hood Guide Service” to lead a group of employees and family members on a climb. Mom and her father signed up. One of the climb leaders was Gilbert Staender (1930–2016). He was only three years older than my mother. By the end of his life, he had become a renowned Northwest climber and a seventy-one-year member of the Mazamas. He was also involved in conservation causes and published a book about his time spent in Alaska’s Brooks Range. I don’t think my mother ever knew all that about her then eighteenyear-old guide.

On July 8, 1948, just days before her climb, Mom acquired her climbing boots, which she described as “pretty neat” in her diary. I don’t know how she could have broken them in, but in fact issues with footwear would exclude my grandfather from the expedition. When the two reached Timberline Lodge, the climb’s departure point, the leaders found what my grandfather was wearing inadequate; he remained at the lodge while my mother climbed on. That memory was the other one that Mom regularly shared with us as kids when we asked about her adventure. She even wrote into her diary that, “daddy wasn’t able to go because of his shoes.”

On Friday, July 9, my mother explained in her journal that, “I washed my hair and am getting ready to go climb Mt. Hood tomorrow night. Oh Boy.” The next day, she wrote just before “leaving in a few minutes for the climb,” that she was wearing her younger brother’s “long underwear and I am hot.” Then off she and grandfather went to Timberline, he driving his Model-A Ford that he kept for many years, even when car styles had decidedly moved on. Mother’s party climbed the night of the July 10 and 11. There were “18 boys [and] 4 girls,” according to mother’s diary. The climb register, which now resides in the Mazama archives, confirms this.

Mt. Hood Register July 11, 1948. Photo: Peter Boag Olga Horand skiing. Photo: unknown

If the leaders recorded the climbers’ names there in the order in which they were on the running belay, my mother was number 7. Number 8, Jerry Parson, was perhaps the anxious fellow creeping up Mt. Hood behind Mom and whose nervousness she remembered so well, even when Alzheimer’s had crept over her.

Mom took her small camera along. I have tiny black and white prints of that day in her life. Someone even snapped a photograph of her at the top, in a lounging pose, donning her new boots, and holding an enormous ice axe. Her photos reveal that there were clouds, but also considerable sun. The latter is confirmed in her journal as is the fact that she seems not to have known about the “10 essentials,” or at least all of them. Even though she had plenty of experience skiing in sunny weather and sunscreen had become widely available in the decade before her ascent, she wrote the day after her return from Hood that, “I sure looked awful today. I have water blisters between my mouth and nose.” As a result, she informed her boyfriend (someone before my father) that she would not be presentable in “public for three days.”

In my thoughts, Mom led me not only up the South Sister, but then subsequently up Mt. Shasta, and Mount St. Helens. This spring (2021), I was able to participate in the Basic Climbing Education Program (BCEP), after the heartbreak of it coming to a swift end before it really even began in the spring of 2020 with the onset of COVID-19. Throughout all this, my goal was always to climb Mt. Hood with a Mazama leading the way, hoping to come yet closer to my mother’s experience and accomplishment.

In fact, after a scheduled climb led by my BCEP instructor, Greg Scott, was postponed due to weather, late on the night of

May 30 we finally headed up the mountain that had been such an important part of my family’s story since at least the time of my mother’s childhood. It turned out to be an experience more than I had imagined. The conditions were perfect, as was the comradeship. The assistant was Michael Valentine. One of my BCEP assistant instructors, Peter Boag on the summit of Mt. Hood holding photo of his mother, Olga Horand, Stacey Reding, was also there, as May 31, 2021. Photo: Sarah Geoghan were two of my teammates and two others. I also carried my 10 essentials and so did not suffer sunburn as had my mom. My group headed up the Mazama Chute. I don’t know Mom’s exact route, but since they all appeared so challenging, it gave me a much greater appreciation for her achievement than I ever had, thus making her story even more adventurous than what I thought as a child. I also have a greater appreciation for poor Jerry Parson’s nervousness. I thought an awful lot about Mom that day—and occasionally Jerry—and I tucked into my pack a copy of the photograph of her on Mt. Hood in 1948. When I reached the summit, I unwrapped it and held it before me. My teammate, Sarah Geoghan, recorded that moment for me, a moment that had been years in the making. My Mom was only fifteen when she completed her climb—very close to the beginning of her life. I am 59 and considerably closer to the end of mine. I have kept a daily journal since June of 1983. For May 31, 2021, I quoted my mother’s diary entry verbatim from July 11, 1948: “Well, I made it and am sure tired, but if I get a rest, I will probably do it again.” Mom never did such a climb again, either of Mt. Hood or any other major peak, at least as she “probably” envisioned it back then. She has, however, accompanied me on everyone of mine.