Tumalo Mountain

We pull into the parking lot at 6:15 am and stumble out of the car into the crisp winter air. It’s still pretty dark, but you can tell the sun is on its way up, even though the sky is foggy from an inversion. We zip up our backpacks, strap on our snowshoes, and adjust our headlamps on top of our beanies as we approach the trailhead. Our goal is to make it to the top of Tumalo Mountain before sunrise, and there’s no time to waste! 

At first, it’s dark and cold in the forested section of the trail. Less than ten minutes in, however, we’re working up a sweat and are forced to shed our puffy jackets and mittens. The trail wastes no time meandering up to the ascent. As soon as you start the hike, you’re essentially going straight uphill until you get to the top. Our snowshoes feel clunky going up the steeper sections, but they help us float over the deep powdery areas. As the forest opens up and dawn continues to break, there’s no longer a need for our headlamps. We take a minute to catch our breath and drink some water as we look behind us and marvel at the iconic, boxy figure of Mt. Bachelor already coming into view through the fog, just half-way into the hike. But we know there’s so much more to see, so we turn around and continue up the mountain, eager to get to the top before the sun peaks over the horizon.

Anticipation builds as we draw nearer to the summit. This is always the portion of the hike that seems to take the longest. We can see the top, but all of the sudden it’s unclear where the trail is. Fortunately for us, it’s pretty difficult to get lost on this tiny mountain, so we continue to blaze our own trail upward. I ask my sister if she considers what we’re climbing a mountain or a butte. She thinks it’s a butte. Interesting, I say, what if I told you that a mountain is differentiated from a butte or a hill when there is a change in vegetation with a change in elevation? She looked around at the ice-covered, wind-blown pines sprinkling the top of Tumalo and speculated that they were indeed quite different from the large lichen-covered firs that dominated at the beginning of our ascent. “Well whatever it is, I just want to be at the top of it!” she said. We took to belting out “The Climb” by Miley Cyrus and “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac until we reached the crest of Tumalo Mountain. 

As soon as we crested the top, the wind picked up and froze our sweaty armpits. We pressed on for the last few hundred feet of flat terrain leading up to the true summit before hastily pulling our layers back on. The sun was already over the horizon, but we didn’t care – the view was absolutely spectacular. To the east was the vast expanse of Central Oregon and its many volcanic buttes casting shadows down below. To the northwest was Broken Top and the Three Sisters just visible through the drifting fog, which morphed into a new configuration every time we took our eyes off of it. To the southwest was Bachelor, blanketed by a faint pink-orange cloud whose soft texture contrasted with the defined edges of the mountainside. In a couple hours, the chairlifts would be running and the slopes would be covered with whooping and hollering winter recreationists like ourselves. But for the moment, all there was to hear was the rush of the wind around us and the crunch of the snow beneath us. We sipped our hot cocoa and watched in awe as the scenery changed around us and the snowy mountains continued to reflect the rising sun. 

Once we had taken in all the sights we could see and our noses had been thoroughly nipped, we started back down the mountain. In the summer, when there’s still some snow fields left on the slope, my friend and I find the most effective (and fun) way to get down the hillside is to “buttslide” as far as we can go — or more realistically, as far as our tushes can handle the cold. In the winter, however, when the snow is too soft and powdery for the buttslide technique, we opt for the “bound down the mountain” method instead. So that’s what we did, letting our snowshoes do the work of keeping us afloat. The descent is so quick and easy, it leaves us feeling like we could turn around and do the whole thing again – well, maybe next year, anyways.

As the Tumalo Mountain hike has gotten more and more popular over the years, I’ve been going for the sunrise more often. Tumalo has become one of my favorite hikes to do when I’m visiting family in Central Oregon. It’s short enough that I don’t have to commit your whole day to it, but strenuous enough that the climb has me questioning, “are we there yet?” at least three times throughout the hike. It’s accessible year-round, as long as you have the right footwear to make it to the top, whether it’s trail shoes for the summer, snowshoes for the winter, or yak-traks for the transition months. More importantly, the views are extremely rewarding considering how short the hike is – a mere two miles to the top and what feels like a half mile back down… but that math doesn’t quite check out. To me, Tumalo Mountain provides the best view of the Central Oregon Cascades you can get without bagging any of the actual big peaks. How grateful I am to be able to keep coming back to this hike year after year.