4A COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL MARCH 1, 2017
O PINION
Offbeat Oregon History: Our mild-mannered active volcano
C
limbing Mount Hood is a big achievement. It’s no Everest, but at 11,244 feet Oregon’s
highest not an insignifi cant mountain either.
But modern climbers making the fi nal assault on the summit have one major psycho-
logical advantage over their fellow climbers of a century ago: They know with nearly
100 percent certainty that the thing isn’t going to explode while they’re standing on top
of it.
Mount Hood, or Wy’East as the Native Americans call it, is an active volcano — something many
Oregonians don’t know. But the last time it expressed itself as such — a minor episode in 1907 involving
steam and smoke, but no fi re or lava — was outside the bounds of living memory. As far as anyone alive
today knows, the mountain has always been just as it now stands — tall, serene, covered with glaciers
and snow.
Such was not its reputation on March 19, 1894, when the offi cers of the old Oregon Alpine Club held
an organizing meeting to plan a new climbing club. The club, to be called the Ma-
zamas (after a Spanish word for a mountain goat), would be open only to people
who had summited Mount Hood.
And later that year, on a blustery July day on which numerous would-be mem-
bers backed out due to weather conditions, 105 intrepid climbers reached the
summit, assembled there, held the fi rst meeting of the Mazama Club, and were
inducted as charter members.
That was at around 3 p.m. After that, as the weather started to look more threat-
ening, they hastily canceled a planned “banquet at the summit,” adjourned, and
hustled back downhill to safer altitudes. The third-oldest mountaineering club in
the country had been formed, and they were now part of its history.
Today, the Mazama Club remains active, with offi ces in Portland and a full
schedule of outdoor skiing, climbing and trekking trips that thousands of peo-
ple participate in every year. But although the membership requirement hasn’t
changed, the meaning of that requirement has.
Today being a Mazama means one is an accomplished mountain climber.
But in 1907, Mazama Club members looking east from Portland at the smok-
ing, grumbling mountain knew their climbs had been more than just a technical
triumph — they’d been a successful braving of the earth’s fi re spirit. They’d
climbed not just any mountain, but a temporarily quiescent volcano — one that
could have erupted under their feet at any moment.
The last major eruption of Mount Hood happened before Lewis and Clark
came to the West Coast, but not by much. Around the time the U.S. Constitution
was being ratifi ed, the mountain cut loose, sending smoke and fi re into the sky,
dropping a six-inch layer of ash all around the mountain and its fl anks, and un-
leashing a torrent of pyroclastic material mixed with rocks, dirt and water from
melted glaciers that roared down the Sandy River valley to the Columbia. This
was the source of the deep “quicksand” after which the river was named several
dozen years later.
This episode kicked off a spate of fi ery activity on top of Oregon’s tallest
mountain that lasted a good 75 years. Oregon newspapers reported excitement
on the mountain in 1853, 1854, 1859 and 1865.
The 1859 eruption is particularly interesting because, of course, that’s the year
Oregon became a state. It was also a very dramatic incident. According to a pi-
oneer named W.F. Courtney, quoted by author Bill Gulick, “It was about 1:30 in
the morning when suddenly the heavens lit up and from the dark there shot up a
column of fi re. … For two hours as we watched the mountain continued to blaze
at irregular intervals. …”
So, less than 35 years before the Mazama Club’s charter members made their
plans to summit Oregon’s largest peak, it had been belching fi re into the night
sky.
Today, every winter, thousands of happy Oregonians slide down the sides of
Mount Hood on skis and inner tubes. (They do that in the summer, too — Tim-
berline offers the only year-round Alpine skiing in North America.)
Every summer, thousands more set out to climb it. Mount Hood is the second
most climbed mountain in the world, after Japan’s Mount Fuji. (New Hamp-
shire’s Mount Monadnock gets more climbers, but is only 3,165 feet high. That's
just 700 feet higher than Mount Constitution on Washington’s Orcas Island,
which gets many times more climbers than both Hood and Monadnock com-
bined — many of whom pedal all the way to the top on bicycles. It all depends
on one’s defi nition of “mountain.”)
Mount Hood is not the most technically diffi cult by a long shot, but it can
be treacherous. Over the years, roughly 140 climbers have been killed on the
mountain.
And yes, one of those was actually killed by volcanic activity, although not the kind one usually thinks
of. In 1934, a fumarole — a crack in the ground venting hot volcanic gases — melted holes and caves in
one of the glaciers on the mountain. A climber, coming across these caves, decided to explore them —
and was overcome by fumes and suffocated inside. This climber remains the only person in state history
to have been killed by a volcano in Oregon.
In the past several dozen years, there have been a number of small “earthquake swarms” at the moun-
tain, reminding everyone that it’s still alive and smoldering. Although any volcanic activity on Mount
Hood will most likely be quite mild compared with the Mount St. Helens eruption, it is one of the more
likely candidates for America’s next volcanic breakout.
Which is an interesting thing to contemplate while riding inner tubes with the kids at Snow Bunny.
C ottage G rove
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