Silcox Warming Hut, Feb 13th

With weather still kind of bad and without a lot of new snow on the ground, it occurred to me that snowshoeing at higher elevations might be a bit better. With that in mind and thinking about combining or adding some fun to the hike, I thought about climbing all the way to the Silcox Warming Hut in Mt Hood and the glissade most of the way down. Silcox Hut is a rustic mountain lodge located at 6950’ roughly 1000’ above Timberline Lodge. This hut was built back in 1939 and thru history; it has passed from hand to hand. Back in 1985 it was added to the national registry of historic places and today it’s managed by the same group that managed Timberline. Presently, the hut can accommodate 24 people on special events. Weather for that day was looking grim with very little chance of any sun. As you’ll see in the pictures, we got even less than that, but it was a very interesting trip. Rarely do you get a chance to be in the mountain in full white-out conditions!
To start this Snowshoe, we drove a bit past Government camp and took the trail towards Tyee Lodge. We made a quick stop to pick up Jeff who was going to accompany us at least for part of the way. From there, we started our walk up on the West Leg Trail until it met with the Alpine Ski Trail, a trail that connects Timberline with Government Camp. That section was probably the steepest one and, as we were going up, we were getting closer and closer to the clouds. As soon as we got the base of one of Timberline’s ski lifts, we were completely in the clouds with very little visibility. On any other normal hike, this would have been enough to turn around and head back, but since we were following one lift lines, there weren’t many chances of getting lost. So we continued on with views of pretty much nothing. Now don’t get me wrong, not seeing anything is very impressive as well. After a while in these conditions, we got to the top of the lift and found ourselves right in front of the lift building but no Silcox Hut. We could actually hear the Sno-Cat close by but with no visibility and not knowing how close or far the hut was we decided to stay where we were. We got in the buildings basement to get out of the elements and grab a quick lunch before heading back down. Our original idea, as I mentioned, was to glissade down from there but with no visibility it would have been a bit dangerous. We ended up snowshoeing our way down until we got back to the Alpine trail at which point we took our snowshoes off and exchanged them for our sliding contraptions. I don’t think I need to go on the details of how much fun was to slide down the rest of the trail back to the lodge and to the cars. Watch the pictures and you’ll get an idea.