Mount Hood National Forest: The Forest Around the Postcard

Mount Hood is the postcard. The volcano at eleven thousand two hundred fifty feet, white-capped and symmetrical, dominates the skyline east of Portland the way a mountain is supposed to dominate a skyline. What surrounds it for more than a million acres is Mount Hood National Forest, the most-visited national forest in the Pacific Northwest and one of the most-visited in the country.

The mountain itself sits inside the forest. Timberline Lodge, the Works Progress Administration masterpiece at six thousand feet on its southern slope, is a forest facility rather than a park facility. The same is true of the dozen or so campgrounds, the hundreds of miles of trails, the three major ski areas, and the year-round snowfields on the upper mountain.

The forest also contains the Wild and Scenic Sandy River, the Wild and Scenic Salmon River, and the headwaters of several other streams that flow down through the forest to the Columbia. The Salmon River, a tributary of the Sandy, is notable because it runs for about thirty miles through the Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness without a single dam. In a state whose major rivers have been impounded almost without exception, the Salmon represents what the Columbia basin rivers once looked like before the dams began.

The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde both have ancestral connections to this landscape. The Hood River Valley on the northern side of the forest, famous for its apple and pear orchards and its Japanese American farming community, relies on water that originates in the forest's snowpack.

The loop that takes you around the mountain on Highway Twenty-Six and Highway Thirty-Five, passing through Government Camp and Hood River, gives you the park experience without the park entrance fee.