Skiing in August

The thought of missing one ski season due to life in equatorial Micronesia and the prospect of missing another due to a large belly made Megan really sad. I had told her that you can ski in Oregon all year round. The skiing is on a glacier high on Mount Hood and can be really terrible or really pretty okay depending on weather and the previous winter's snow fall. Last Saturday we decided to give it a try. Megan was really excited. Of all my life's accomplishments getting my then girlfriend and now wife to love skiing ranks pretty high.

The thing with summer skiing is that you have to start pretty early in the morning. Mt Hood is about two hours away so we left around 0530. If you want to ski all day it costs $45. This gets you six or seven hours of skiing on a glacier. We decided that one run was enough for us so we carried our skis up the mountain. The run that we paralleled is called the "Magic Mile" so named due to its length. The ascent is a little over a mile, gains about 1500 feet of elevation and took us about an hour and half (we took a lot breath/picture breaks).

The decent took a quite a while because Megan kept stopping saying that she wanted to savor it. The snow was good. Oliver was really good...


Here is a view of Mt Hood socked in from the parking lot...


The trail had a nice view from time to time...


Here is a video of Oliver following Megan. The sound is absolutely terrible due to skiing on hard snow and wind. You can see that the run is so long it kind of ends in the clouds. Oliver ran down the whole run following us during all of our S-turns...