OK, I got started really late on this one, about lunch-thirty. As my strength and speed improve, I have more wiggle room in the hiking day for departures and arrivals; I stayed up late the night before preparing raw vegan snacks and I needed to sleep in to make up for lost energy; it was a Saturday and I wanted to avoid as much of the Cooper Spur Weekend Horde as possible; Cloud Cap Road was a xylophone of obnoxious run-off ditches cut right into the gravel, necessitating a snail like crawl to the trailhead; my bed was really, really warm and my bedroom was really, really cold that morning. Pick one.
It’s always enjoyable to start the day off with a little hair-pulling frustration: insert Cloud Cap Trail, the Sullivan Edition. I know the Sullivan hiking books are like the Dead Sea Scrolls around here but I’ve found enough discrepancies over the years to cut my worship in half. Just trust me: it ain’t 0.2 miles to the 600 junction and you take the trail that goes down in order to go up, not the obvious one with all the footprints on it. The footprints are merely testament to the vast numbers of other duped soles…er, souls.
Luckily, I was immediately satisfied by how rapidly one rises above tree line. It presents the illusion that you have come much further, much faster. It was a beautiful day–which explains why I encountered approximately 1.2 million people before I even got to the spot above–and I’m glad I brought sunscreen because the layers came off! Others were smart enough to make use of the shade…the dark specs inside her web are offspring.
I made the Timberline Trail junction at 6650′ in record time and sincerely wanted to enjoy lunch in the shade of the picturesque rock shelter a few hundred yards away but…well…when three middle-aged drunks in lawn chairs salute you with their Budweiser cans from the doorway and shout at you to join them over the din of the rock music they having blaring inside, you suddenly find a plain old rock, out of site and out of earshot, appealing. I traded Asian Pear slices for dried apricots with a couple who was also hiding from the “party” and none of us ventured back for photos. Oh, well, it’ll still be there for the snowshoeing season. I snapped a quick shot of the trail junction marker instead and leaned into the task of another three miles of dusty switchbacks just crawling with hikers.
Adams, Rainer, and St. Helens (right to left) were awfully stately from here. It was the clearest day I’d seen yet in Oregon. At the spur’s rim, it was also the windiest. Every time you reached the edge and got a decent eyeful of Eliot Glacier you also got an eyeful of andesitic dust and sand. I don’t know why people pay for Lasik surgery; they could just stand at a few spots on the Cooper Spur Trail and let the prevailing winds grind down their corneas for free. Easy-peasy.
I hauled ass to Tie-In Rock and a little bit beyond, thinking I had plenty of time to get up there and pet a glacier: Just look at that sun shine!
Er…wait a minute….
DOH!
I knew it wouldn’t be full dark for quite a while but I looked around me and suddenly noticed that it was very quiet. The hordes were gone. I was all alone on the mountain, save one or two ice climbers who were camped out on the ridge. Even the Search and Rescue training team below was leaving. You can see their ant-like profiles inching their way across the bottom of Eliot Glacier right at the shadow line. (Double-click the image.)
Hey, when the pros start pulling up their proverbial tent stakes, I take notice. I turned my butt around. But I did linger a tad to admire their glorious playground. Each of these crevasses are large and deep enough to swallow an H3.
The shadow of Mt. Hood had become a light-sucking monster that was not-so-slowly devouring the trail. At first, I thought the false summit near Tie-In Rock looked pretty close and I was sure I could….
DOH!
Okay, well, the switchbacks are a lot easier to knock off on the way down, I’m sure I can at least get to the rock shelter before…DOH!
…and there goes the Eliot glacial moraine. Shadow Monster sure is hungry; that valley below has no idea what it has in store. (Insert the attack music from “Jaws.”) 
The weird angles of light are playing with the glaciers, though, and making my dark descent memorable. The packed ice on the east flank of Cooper Spur (not sure if it’s a remnant of Eliot or Newton Clark Glacier) has melted into messy cornrows of cold and grit.
Solid evidence, and I do mean solid, of Hood’s ongoing volcanic activity is showing up along the trail in bright relief among the shadows. Large yellow clods of chalky rock are backing up the sulfur smell I picked out here and there on the stiff breeze. I had the pleasure of kibitzing with a geologist earlier in the hike and he confirmed my nose’s suspicions: this stratovolcano is still out-gassing, it’s no where near finished.
I took the opportunity in between wind blasts to survey my conquest. The mountain looks pretty handsome dressed all in blue, really brings out his eyes.
None of the folks I passed that day seemed to know for sure where Tie-In Rock was so I never really learned whether or not I had made it to that spot until I had gotten back home and cross-referenced my photographs with online accounts of the hike. All I knew at this point was that I had made it this far, and that was pretty damned good.
It appears from the photo that I was pretty close to the tippy-top of the spur at that point and I was. It would have been nothing to press on and sink my hand into Newton Clark Glacier for posterity before calling it a day. (However, the fact that I made it to my vehicle later on just as the trail descended completely into head-clobbering, toe-stubbing blackness tells me that I made the right choice to retreat when I did. That and the fact that I had no headlamp with me. Double Doh!)
Polishing off the last of the switchbacks, I watched helplessly as the Shadow Monster sunk its teeth into Bluegrass Ridge below and eventually swallowed it whole.
A close up on the carnage: like watchin’ Animal Planet, ain’t it?
An added bonus were two eerie ribbons of pinkish-brown smoke that snaked their way out over the Hood River Valley. 
At least I think it was smoke. Could’ve just as easily been the breath of the Shadow Monster.
The curious way they held their form for so many miles had my attention. There must have been a perfect conduit of warmth and moisture for smoke to travel in at that elevation, a sort of sooty highway in the sky. It never spread nor dissipated, just oozed along in thick ropes like a pair of sleepy boa constrictors.
The next pleasant surprise was the bright evening glow of autumn foliage at tree line.
The Cascade Mountain Ash was resplendent in Technicolor hues.
It punctuated the trail like paint splatters and spilled across it like molten lava.
Certain patches blazed as bright as campfires and their berries glowed like coals.
I spotted Adams in the far distance, soaking up the last few thermal rays of Saturday….
…and then I witnessed something completely awesome: the internal anatomy of a Shadow Monster! I saw the terminator line of Mt. Hood’s shadow in cross-section as it plunged like a javelin into the forest below.
Called a mountain shadow spike, this strange and exciting phenomenon is a direct extension of the shadow and occurs when the observer is entirely within the three dimensional shape of the shadow as it is cast upon the ground to the side of it’s object. Humidity and particulates in the air make this visually possible, you won’t see it on an extremely clear day–let’s hear it for that pink smoke!
The mystical illusion of whiter light bending around the outside edge of the shadow is most likely a Mach band. (You can see this far better in these photos if you don’t look directly at the shadow. Move your eyes around the image or take a couple steps away from your computer screen and the white line will show up rather dramatically.) Thank you, Dr. Kerton, and whomever else you cajoled into ferreting out these fun facts. I hope there wasn’t a riot at the ISU faculty meeting!
The dark line below the pinkish Belt of Venus at sunset is the Earth’s shadow, itself. Very cool. You can just see the curve of our planet in it here:
My final thrill came on the slow backtrack of lumpy, bumpy Cloud Cap Road. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a large building on fire way off in the distance. I slowed down and it became the intense red lights of a major aircraft flying dangerously close to the ground. Moments later, I figured out it’s true identity and pulled the truck over in the dark with a reverent, “Holy $#@%!”
The moon was so blood red that it defied reality. About ten attempts at capture with an old DSLR convinced me of two things: I need a better camera and some lessons. I resigned myself to memorizing a mental picture of our closest celestial body glowing redder than a traffic light and I got back into my vehicle. I passed several people further down the road leaning awkwardly over the hoods of Chevrolets and Subarus, doing their best to commemorate a truly dramatic event without a tripod.
I chalk the whole day up as dramatic, so I slept pretty well, considering.
