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EARLY SKIING IN OREGON
by Lowell Skoog
Skiing in the Pacific Northwest arrived with the railroads in the late 1800s. As the Northern Pacific Railroad was extended down the Columbia River to the coast, thousands of British, German, and Scandinavian immigrants were lured by immigration agencies to settle along the new line.
In the 1880s, residents of the Hood River valley built a tourist road from the Columbia River to the northeastern flank of Mt. Hood. A tent camp was initially established, and in 1889 the Cloud Cap Inn was constructed near 5,900 feet on the mountain. Next to the construction of the railroad itself, the inn was considered the most important development project in the valley at the time.
During the severe winter of 1889–90, Will and Doug Langille set out from Hood River on homemade skis to see how the inn was faring under the crushing snows. This was the first recorded ski trip to the north side of Mt. Hood and the earliest reference to skiing I’ve found in the Cascades between Mt. Hood and the Canadian border. The Langille party photographed the snowy scenes, popularizing the idea of winter recreation on Mt. Hood.
In 1903, three members of the Mazamas, Colonel Lester Hawkins, Martin Gorman, and T. Brooke White, backpacked with skis to Government Camp on the south side of Mt. Hood, where they were guests of Oliver C. Yocum, manager of the Mountain View House. White predicted, “The time would come when more people would visit Mt. Hood in the winter than in the summer.”
The south side of Mt. Hood became the focus of skiing as winter access was improved. The highway to Government Camp was paved in 1922 and plowed in winter starting around 1927. The Mazamas established their first lodge near Government Camp in 1924 and made their first regular winter outing there over the New Year’s holiday.
The Summit ski area at Government Camp, the oldest on the south side of Mt. Hood, began development in 1927–28. Skiing on the hills around Government Camp continued to grow, and more ambitious skiers began making forays to the slopes above the timberline.
In the 1930s there was informal competition for the fastest time from the Portland city limits to the top of 11,235-foot
Mt. Hood and back. On April 26, 1931, Hjalmar Hvam and Arne Stene of the Cascade Ski Club joined Swiss skier Andre Roch to set a new record. With driver Harald Lee, the party left Portland at 6:03 a.m. and returned at 2:52 p.m., for a roundtrip time of 8 hours, 49 minutes. They started skiing halfway between Government Camp and the timberline. Their ascent was remarkable not only because of their fast time, but because they kept their skis on continuously to the summit and back. Hvam would later become a Hall of Fame skier, while Roch would establish a career as the world’s foremost expert on snow and avalanches.
The April 1931 ski ascent of Mt. Hood was no fluke. In December of that year, a ski party including Elsa Hanft of Spokane repeated the ascent. (It’s unknown whether continued on next page the party skied all the way to the summit.) Formerly a guide at Mt. Baker Lodge, Hanft was probably the first woman to scale Mt. Hood with the help of skis.
In 1937–38, his second season in the Northwest, Otto Lang, a protégé of the famous Austrian instructor, Hannes Schneider, opened a ski school on Mt. Hood. The school was at the timberline, where the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was busy finishing the construction of Timberline Lodge. The lodge opened to the public in February 1938. The Mt. Hood ski patrol, the nation’s first organized volunteer patrol, was also formed that year. A rope tow was built at Government Camp that winter, and a portable tow was installed at Timberline the following year.
Early Oregon skiers completed significant cross-country adventures. In 1917 Dean Van Zant, Clem Blakney, and Chester Treichel skied from Mt. Hood nearly to Mt. Jefferson, a trek of about 60 miles. Carrying 60-pound packs with snowshoes as backup for their skis, they hoped to climb Mt. Jefferson near the end of their trip but abandoned that plan due to a snowstorm.
Encircling the volcanic peaks became a logical step in exploration after the summits had been reached on skis. In April 1934, Ralph Calkin and James Mount of the Wy’east Club made the first ski encirclement of Mt. Hood. They left Cloud Cap Inn at 8:20 a.m. and returned at 6 p.m., after encountering fog and small avalanches on the Reid Glacier. During the spring of 1937, Joe Leuthold and Everett Darr repeated the circuit to join the select group of what were known as “Side Hill Gougers.”
By the mid-1930s, the Oregon Skyline Trail (now the Pacific Crest Trail) between Mt. Hood and Mt. Jefferson was being developed, and parties from the Forest Service’s Mt. Hood office skied it several times. In 1948 Jack Meissner skied the trail from Mt. Hood all the way to Crater Lake, a distance of about 300 miles. Completed during one of the coldest and snowiest winters in years, the trek required 33 travel days, and Meissner broke trail by himself for most of them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lowell Skoog is a retired engineer, a Mazama member, and a life-long skier. He volunteers as archivist and historian with The Mountaineers in Seattle. He is the founder of The Alpenglow Gallery (alpenglow.org) and author of Written in the Snows: Across Time on Skis in the Pacific Northwest, which received the National Outdoor Book Award for history in 2022.
