40 Fun Facts About Mount Hood

Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood stood in for a haunted, snowbound hotel in which horror film?

The Shining shows the lodge only from outside, and at the owners' request the film swapped the novel's haunted Room 217 for a non-existent 237 so guests would not avoid a real room.

Mount Hood ranks fourth among the peaks of the Cascade Range, so which volcano is the range's highest?

Mt. Rainier tops the range at more than 14,000 feet, some 3,000 feet above Oregon's high point. California's Mt. Shasta comes second and Mt. Adams third.

Mount Hood, built up by eruptions over some 500,000 years, belongs to which steep-sided class of volcano?

Stratovolcano cones are piled up from lava domes, flows and ash, and scientists rate Mount Hood the Oregon volcano most likely to erupt again.

Samuel Hood, for whom Mount Hood was named in 1792, made his name in Britain as what?

An admiral of the Royal Navy, Hood fought the American Revolution from the other side: in 1781 he sailed with the fleet that was driven off at the Chesapeake while trying to relieve Yorktown.

Which U.S. president dedicated Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in person, praising the relief workers who built it?

Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the lodge in September 1937 as a monument to the skill of workers on relief rolls, and predicted that crowds would one day come for winter sports.

Which toll route, opened in 1846 around the south side of Mount Hood, became the last overland leg of the Oregon Trail?

Barlow Road spared pioneers a dangerous raft trip, but at Laurel Hill the grade was so steep that wagons were lowered on ropes wound around trees.

Which village at the foot of Mount Hood is named for wagons abandoned there in 1849 on a hard mountain crossing?

Government Camp got its name from pioneers who found the wagons a U.S. Army mounted regiment had left behind after dozens of its mules starved on the mountain crossing.

Which pair of explorers reached the Sandy River in 1805 and found it choked with debris from Mount Hood's eruptions?

Lewis and Clark named it the Quicksand River for its shifting bed, the washed-down remains of eruptions that had ended only about a decade before they arrived.

The town of Hood River, about 30 miles north of Mount Hood, bills itself as the world capital of which sport?

Windsurfing set off the town's first tourism boom, kiteboarding followed, and the U.S. national championships have been held there several times.

The Hood to Coast relay starts at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood and ends on the sand in which Oregon town?

Seaside throws the finish-line party after teams of twelve share 36 legs and nearly 200 miles, in a race that began in 1982 with just eight teams.

Geologists contrast Mount Hood's quieter, dome-building eruptions with the violent blasts of which Cascade neighbour?

Mt. St. Helens is known for explosive eruptions like its 1980 blast, whereas Mount Hood tends to pile up lava domes that collapse into hot avalanches and mudflows.

Before a wagon route opened around Mount Hood, Oregon Trail pioneers had to raft down which river from The Dalles?

The Columbia was a perilous and expensive last leg to Fort Vancouver, and in 1845 as many as sixty families faced a wait of more than ten days at The Dalles for a boat.

Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood was built in the 1930s by which New Deal jobs agency?

Works Progress Administration crews hand-built the lodge, and about 80 percent of the building budget went on wages, with laborers paid between 55 and 90 cents an hour.

Which famous long-distance hiking route shares about eleven miles of path with the Timberline loop around Mount Hood?

Pacific Crest Trail walkers follow the loop along the mountain's west side, on a path the Civilian Conservation Corps cut through the high meadows in the 1930s.

The 1920 Oregon Skyline route ran from Mount Hood to which landmark in the state's far south?

Crater Lake was the far end of the original Skyline, a ridge-top path for hikers and riders that was later stretched to run the whole length of the state.

Which name from a legend of two rival chiefs is popularly used as an Indigenous name for Mount Hood?

Wy'east is a chief turned into the mountain in one telling of the Bridge of the Gods legend, yet scholars have found no evidence it was ever a genuine name for the peak in any Indigenous language.

In the early 1900s the Forest Service kept which unlikely structure on the very summit of Mount Hood?

A fire lookout cabin perched on the summit gave a watcher a view over a vast sweep of forest, but the mountain's weather eventually destroyed it and nothing remains.

At the 1937 dedication lunch at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood, guests ate salmon and a pie of which mountain berry?

Huckleberry pie was a local choice, since the berries grow wild in the forest around the mountain. The First Lady praised the lodge's huge timbers in her newspaper column.

USS Mount Hood, a Navy ship named for the Oregon peak, was lost in 1944 while carrying which cargo?

Ammunition in her holds detonated at anchor off Manus Island in November 1944, destroying the ship and leaving 45 confirmed dead and 327 missing.

Which Mount Hood resort, the closest to Portland, calls itself the largest night ski area in the United States?

Skibowl lights about two thirds of its 960 acres after dark, and it began life as two separate resorts that joined forces in 1964.

Mount Hood's summer ski season runs on a snowfield named for which pioneer, who scouted the slope in 1845?

Joel Palmer climbed high onto the glaciers that year to find a way down for stranded wagons, and the snowfield named for him now hosts ski and snowboard camps all summer.

Which future publisher of The Oregonian is credited with the first documented ascent of Mount Hood, in 1857?

Henry Pittock reached the top with four friends, three years after his own boss made a disputed claim to have got there first.

Which Portland mountaineering club was founded in 1894 by climbers who elected its first president atop Mount Hood?

The Mazamas began that day when 193 people, 38 of them women, reached the top, and the club welcomed women as full members from the start.

The Crag Rats, the oldest volunteer mountain rescue team in the U.S., maintain which 1889 building on Mount Hood?

Cloud Cap Inn is the oldest building on the mountain, a luxury climbers' hotel that had telephones by 1894 and closed as a business in 1946.

Mount Hood exists because which small ocean plate is sliding beneath the continent off Oregon and Washington?

Juan de Fuca is the plate whose slow dive controls where the region's earthquakes and volcanoes occur, in a line from northern California to southern Canada.

A climber exploring Mount Hood's ice caves in 1934 became the Cascades' first known volcanic fatality; what killed him?

Oxygen-poor air filled the caves, which had been melted into the glacier by volcanic gas vents that still steam near the summit today.

On Mount Hood's popular south climbing route, the Hogsback ridge leads up to which famous gap in the summit rocks?

Pearly Gates is the final gateway to the summit plateau, on a route that is the mountain's easiest but still demands ropes, ice axes and crampons.

Before a pioneer campaigned to rename it after Mount Hood, the Hood River was known by the name of which animal?

Dog River is said to recall a party of starving travellers who ate dog meat, a name locals disliked so much that a settler's wife talked them into changing it.

Mount Hood appears on a 2010 U.S. quarter, pictured in the distance beyond which body of water?

Lost Lake is said to owe its name to a hunting guide who had worked the area for years without finding it, until Native Americans showed him the way.

Snowy shots of Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood doubled as a Bavarian ski resort in which 1960s wartime sitcom?

Hogan's Heroes was set in a German prisoner-of-war camp, so Oregon's best-known ski lodge had to pass for the Alps in several episodes.

Which lieutenant on George Vancouver's expedition named Mount Hood in 1792 after sighting it from a river island?

William Broughton spotted the snowy peak from what is now Sauvie Island and wrote that it seemed to announce the end of the river he was charting.

Which 1939 chairlift above Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood was the longest in the world when it opened?

Magic Mile was one of the very first chairlifts built anywhere, and its original top station, Silcox Hut, survives as a rustic lodge about 1,000 feet above the main one.

Timberline Lodge's Depression-era builders on Mount Hood forged andirons and ironwork from which recycled material?

Railroad tracks became andirons, tire chains became fireplace screens, old camp blankets became hooked rugs and cedar utility poles became carved stair posts.

Mount Hood National Forest began in 1892 as a reserve named for which river, the source of Portland's drinking water?

Bull Run water is still guarded in a restricted watershed inside the forest, which only took the mountain's name in 1924.

Which federal agency monitors Mount Hood from its Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington?

U.S. Geological Survey scientists have put the odds of an eruption within 30 years at between 3 and 7 percent, and three new monitoring stations went onto the mountain in 2020.

Which volcano, looming over the southern end of Mount Hood National Forest, is Oregon's second-highest peak?

Mt. Jefferson is so rugged and remote that it counts among the hardest Cascade volcanoes to reach, a sharp contrast with its busy neighbor to the north.

Which body of ice on the northeast side of Mount Hood is the mountain's largest by volume and its thickest?

Eliot Glacier holds ice up to 361 feet deep, and two fur-company explorers may have climbed onto it as early as 1818, decades before anyone stood on the summit.

The heritage trains that climb from Hood River toward Mount Hood reverse direction using which rare track layout?

A switchback lets the train zigzag up a slope too steep for a curve, and this is one of only a handful still in use on rail lines in the United States.

An 1854 expedition's faulty measurement led many references to call Mount Hood the highest point in what?

North America's summit was long assumed to be here because the party calculated 18,361 feet, about 7,000 feet too high. A later climber claimed 19,400.

In 1940 Mount Hood and its surrounding forest were considered for which federal designation that never came through?

A national park was proposed but never created, so the mountain stayed a working national forest. Campaigners against logging have since revived the idea.