The Narrative Image

Monkey-cam had been monitoring the internet for weather reports and once he saw the little smiling sun symbols in the weekend boxes, he began begging in earnest for another chance to see Cooper Spur before the onset of serious snow. Regular viewers may recall that Monkey-cam was in the process of testing some boundaries and chose our last Cooper Spur expedition as the scene for acting out his new found sense of independence. I kept suggesting lower altitude hikes because I was pretty sure the last weather front had deposited snow down to the 4000 ft. level, but when I got an email from Mr. Lloyd (of Long Shadow Photography - www.longshadowphoto.com ) reporting that the road to Cloud Cap was still open, I relented and started rounding up the hiking gear. Mt. Hood as seen from the Parkdale Ranger Station where you can’t get forest parking permits on Sunday because they’re closed. It’s a fairly long drive from Portland to Mt. Hood so I was glad to have Monkey-cam’s company. We tried to ca...

See Also Mt. Adams / Bird Creek Meadows http://thenarrativeimage.blogspot.com/2007/09/mt-adams-bird-creek-meadows.html Hellroaring Canyon Overlook From 09-03-07 to 09-23-07 This time, determined to reach Iceberg Lake, I opted to take the Climber’s trail (number 20, I think) which follows the edge of the cliff overlooking Hellroaring Canyon. Above the viewpoint area, the grass told a very succinct story about dehydration. Even though I had a clearer idea of where I needed to go to reach the lake based on my scouting activities weeks earlier, I still found it difficult to follow the ‘trail’ when it veered off into the rocks. More than once, I found myself completely trail-less and in those instances, I used a simple strategy that I call, ‘go up’. Sometimes I would run across what appeared to be artificially stacked rocks – cairns – that I assumed were constructed to mark ‘the way’ for hikers and climbers. But it takes a little bit of faith to follow them (they could just as well be t...