First Mountain Snow 2021

Over the period of September 17,18, and 19, I believe it was, we had a much needed, although short of enough, rainfall after months of dry weather. Something like 6 months being well below significant amounts with 3 of those months being completely devoid of any precipitation amounts. The heatwave at the end of June substantially reduced the snow levels on Mt Hood and by the time September rolled around had depleted the normal glaciers to abnormally small ribbons of white. The mountain was almost completely barren.

When the first rain arrived three weeks later than normal, I waited with anticipation to see what the mountain would look like when the skies cleared. I was not disappointed. On September 20, returning home from picking up a load of groceries, as the clouds were clearing overhead, I caught a sudden glimpse of the mountain. What a beautiful garment of white it was sporting! Even though it was not a ton of snow, nevertheless it was magnificent! We unloaded as quickly as possible, grabbed the camera gear, and headed for the slopes. Some of you may remember a few shots we captured on that day via phone camera so we could share instantly on Facebook.

On the way up, the clouds were very sparse and left us a fantastic view. But when we pulled into the Timberline parking lot at 1:03pm they were already rewrapping the mountain in their blankets of cold gray cotton. I chose a spot that was easy access from the parking lot but would still give us a wonderful view of the peak, if the clouds should begin to break up again. I wasn’t sure. I figured it would be a waiting game, but I didn’t know if we would be disappointed or not. Snapped a few shots here and there to get the camera settings as close to ready as possible and then waited. Thirty minutes. One hour. One and a half hours. Nothing. We snapped a few shots of other interesting things around us, small scraggly trees, old weather beaten and degrading logs, Red-Tailed Hawk, Golden-mantled Ground Squirrel, and even an airliner overhead. And a huge mushroom that I thought, at first glance, was a discarded hamburger bun. I was losing patience by the two-hour mark.

A few minutes later, at about 3:15pm, breaks began appearing in the clouds revealing small but tantalizing snippets of the peak. Time to work. The camera on the tripod, with the 35-105mm lens, I set to interval shooting, checking it every few minutes in order to make some exposure adjustments and restart the interval. Regina shot handheld with the 105mm lens while I shot handheld with the 200-500mm lens. Nonstop clicking for 20 minutes. And then the clouds blanketed the mountain again obscuring the peak from our view. We wound down and waited again. But we didn’t have to wait as long this time, about 35 minutes and it broke open again. Another 20 minutes afforded us even more spectacular photos than the first session.

Finally, returning to the vehicle we pulled to the north end of the parking lot, which was almost devoid of any other cars, and settled down for a bit of food and some more shots of the mountain, this time completely cleared of clouds and standing out starkly against the gorgeous blue sky. There was consideration of waiting until after sundown to maybe capture some evening and night shots, but I was tired and wanting to get home.

Well, we might as well have stayed. On the way home I figured we’d make a “quick” stop at Jonsrud Viewpoint to see what we could capture in long distance shots of the mountain since the skies were clear. The limited parking was already full, and several photographers were lined up along the fence with their cameras mounted on tripods waiting for something, but I didn’t know for what. We parked in the neighborhood and joined the others in the lineup at about 6:35pm. I took a quick look at the moon phases on my weather app and found out why everyone was lined up here. Full moon tonight. So we hung out until the moon rose on the south flank of the mountain. Spectacular! But, I don’t really know what I’m doing when it comes to taking photos of the moon against a landscape so they didn’t really turn out as well as I would have liked.

After the last photo had been captured at 7:57pm we finally headed home. 3,124 photos. All in a day’s work.