Thursday was an available day for me to get out and enjoy the blue-sky forecast, so I contacted my friend Jim from the Hood River Area to look into some snowshoeing on his side of the mountain. I had been wanting something more "remote " than the popular areas I had been so far this winter - but not getting lost was a high criteria :) We decided on exploring the Polallie Ridge-Tilly Jane Trails - which would be new for me.
We drove south on Hwy. 35 and turned west on the Cooper Spur Road (between mile posts 73 and 74, approx. 23 miles south of Hood River) After about 2-3 miles we turned left onto Cloud Cap Road, and a couple more miles to the Cooper Spur Ski Resort. It was closed and abandoned (open Fri-Sun.), except for a maintenance worker just getting ready to leave - after chatting with him and making sure it was okay to park there, we had the whole ski area to ourselves.
We donned our snowshoes and headed UP the ski hill, behind and to the right of the chair lift thingy (I'm not a skiier ;), and started on a trail up the Polallie Ridge (#643A ). Jim hadn't been up this way for a few years, and was surprised at the more apparent usage of it now. I read later that just in 2004, this trail was cleared by help from the Cooper Spur Wild and Free members and the Forest Service after years of neglect. The more popular Tilly Jane Trail (#643) runs fairly parallel to this but a bit further northwest, and is part of a designated historic site including the Cloud Cap area : http://www.cooperspur.org/history.htm
It was quite the climb, (close to 2000' elev. in about three miles through crusty, several-inch-deep snow), I had to stop frequently to damper my pounding heart, whew! ;). We had the deep Polallie Creek Canyon to our left, occasional views of Mt. Hood ahead,
and traversed through a medium-dense forest of Douglas Firs, Ponderosas, Larch, and rare old-growth survivors (from decades-old fires) here and there. We also noticed and were concerned about the many dying trees we were seeing - from disease or beetles - anyone famliar with this situation?
We saw other snowshoe as well as X-Ski tracks meandering on or veering from our route, but I would advise anyone trying to follow a "trail" in this area, to pay close attention to the blue diamonds. We went a bit high and missed our "connecting" trail, but Jim got us down and over to the Tilly Jane cabin. (elev. approx. 5500')
There were three young men here when we arrived, shoveling snow away from windows to get more light inside. We chatted with them as they started up the woodstove inside for some warmth, and by their packs it looked like they were planning to spend the night.
We had our lunch, I made an entry in the cabin logbook, and thumb-tacked a PH sticker on the bulletin board :)
Mt. Hood from Tilly Jane Trail:
We decided to just take the Tilly Jane Trail back down, "just" being a relative term. This trail is mostly wide and well-used ,
but very steep and unrelenting, often like a "shute" so side-stepping was required sometimes (snowshoeing like this / / ) . I was glad we took the more varying terrain (thus distracting ;) way up on the Polallie Ridge. When we got to a lower junction, all of the signs said 2.5 miles up to the cabin, but even going slow it didn't seem that far from this point- ?
We left the main trail and continued on to the top of the ski area again, and made our way down, switchbacking on our snowshoes, but something to "glissade" with might have been fun 
Mt. Adams and Rainier in the distance:
The whole Cooper Spur area is uniquely beautiful and fragile, and an active issue in the environmental/politcal arenas (google Cooper Spur for more info), but do get up there and enjoy it if you can! I'm guestimating we did 5-6 miles today. Thanks Jim! | 
