Location Taken: Northern Oregon
Time Taken: June 2008
This is my one and only photo of Mount Hood.
Yes, the photo is of a sideview mirror on the car reflecting a blurry image of Mount Hood.
Despite going along the Columbia River Gorge (which goes right by Mount Hood), and then heading south into Oregon along the highways in the Willamette valley which also goes near Mount Hood for a while, I managed not to get any photos of it. And I’ve even been through the Gorge twice!
It’s geography and weather’s fault, you see. The Columbia River Gorge has high cliff walls in the area near Mount Hood, since the river had to carve its way through the hills surrounding the volcano. And, being the Pacific Northwest, the trees are really tall and block what little view the rocks let through. And, again, being the Pacific Northwest, clouds are really common and covered the mountain for a lot of the time.
The second time I went through the Gorge, the weather was fine. I was just asleep during the time I was near Mount Hood.
And thus came this photo. I realized that I didn’t have a picture of this fine volcano and that we could finally get a good view of it. Unfortunately, we’d passed it already, and I couldn’t get a stable shot when I tried to get a direct shot, and besides, the car got in the way. The sideview mirror was more stable, though, so that’s the shot I kept. Yes it’s blurry, but at least you can tell it’s a mountain.
As for why I bothered, well, it’s a VOLCANO! I like volcanoes! And I’d already gotten some nice shots of Mt. St. Helens and a lot of photos of Mt. Rainier, and even some of the Three Sisters volcanoes that are the next down the chain, so I wanted to complete the set.
Admittedly, I didn’t get any of the cascade volcanoes further north than Rainier, or south of the Three Sisters, and I missed Mount Jefferson and Mount Adams… I mean, there’s 20 major volcanoes in the Cascade chain running from British Columbia to Northern California, most of them quite able to erupt again, and I only got photos of six of them… Hmmm… Guess I’ve got my work cut out for me. Now if only I lived closer than 2000 miles away from them…
