Day 5 (August 21)

Goodbye to Hood

After a big breakfast, we bid goodbye to the Timberline Lodge. Sorry there's no photo of the lodge, Deb took some with her camera but the computer here doesn't have an sdcard slot. It's an ancient Pentium 3 running Ubuntu, no foolin', and while I'm all for recycling old kit, the javascript-heavy blogspot interface doesn't fare too well. So I tried using the iphone for Day 4, but heavens did that turn out ugly. Now the iphone's all I have, so I presume things will be ugly for the foreseeable. Sorry, I'll fix it when I get a chance.

Anyway, there's plenty to say about Timberline Lodge, and most of it's got nothing to do with the computer room. It was build as a WPA project under FDR. It's vaguely shaped like Mt Hood, if you squint right. It still has skiing and snowboarding year 'round, though Mt Hood's glaciers and snow banks are shrinking. It was used for some of the exterior shots of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, but there's no hedge maze here. It was slightly decrepit, but restored to it's original beauty in the 70's, and now the new operators got "recovery" money to bring it up to modern accessibility code. They have a glass case with a hardhat and a shovel and a plaque that says "Shovel Ready!" and a picture of President Obama, all pretty cheesy but it's nice to know that, even if rarely, something truly beautiful gets "bailed out."

With a full load of food and water, we hiked south along the high, dusty trail with Mt Hood behind us. Passed a couple of northbound riders -- the entire PCT is designated both pedestrian and equestrian, but the horses have been very few. As we descend, we're once again surrounded by the dying pines draped (Deb says "festooned") with moss. So many fallen trees that it's hard to find a spot for the tent.

[Note - I've gone through the pictures and it looks like we don't have a good one of the lodge afterall. There are plenty of nice ones floating around, but sadly they don't show all the "shovel-ready" scaffolding.]