Newton Creek, Jan 9th

Having done most of the well known snowshoe routes in Mt Hood, I wanted to try something new. After a bit of research, I decided to explore Newton Creek. While doing my research, I did find some non-official winter routes that, in combination with the Newton Creek route opened the possibility to do a loop where more than half was backcountry. The only not so good thing was that weather forecast was not so good for that day. After meeting at our normal spot, we drove all the way to the Mt Hood River Meadows. This is a Nordic ski area located on the east side of Mt Hood Meadows. In the area, there are several trails established for cross country ski and some other summer routes that get very light use during the winter. Weather was as predicted, overcast and snowing. We started heading east on a well marked trail that crossed a small creek and then continued to Newton Creek which we reached in less than half an hour. The views, despite the weather were very interesting although we did not see even a hint of Mt Hood. From the map I had, it looked like we could follow the creek uphill for quite a while but reality was a bit different. Due to the map scale, you can’t make a steep wall on the side of the creek that makes this route impassable. After discovering this, we had to backtrack, not for too long, and then take a parallel route. As we did this, weather changed completely and most of the clouds disappeared giving us a nice blue sky. We continued climbing thru the woods which didn’t offer a lot of views but we were able to see Gnarl Ridge from a couple of points. As we continued up, the small valley we had to our left started to change and close and soon we found ourselves traversing on the side of a slope. Further to the left was another ridge, much higher than where we were, that was our return path, so we knew that at some point we would need to make up there. As we continued, we did notice the valley getting closer to our elevation and suddenly we found tracks crossing to the other side that didn’t require descending too much into the gully. Not climbing further made us pay the price though. From that point, the only way to get up to the ridge was climbing a very steep hill. After some huffing and puffing, we finally made it to the ridge where we stopped for a while to enjoy a bit of sun and the views. I thought that we would still have to navigate back to the cars but quickly found that someone on a snowboard had done the same route earlier that day. We followed those tracks as they wound lazily thru the trees following the ridge all the way down. That section almost made us regret not having something to slide on as the snow was a very nice powder. Then, weather started turning for the worse but luckily we were back on the connector trail that took us in the morning all the way to Newton Creek, so from there we turned right and went back to the cars.



You can check the pictures here