South Sister Summit Trail

Author's Comments

Twelve miles and nearly five thousand feet of elevation, and none of it technical. That is the strange gift of South Sister. The mountain asks for your lungs and your legs but not your rope, and the reward at the top is one of the longest sightlines in Oregon. On a clear morning in August I have stood on the summit and traced the Cascades from Hood in the north all the way down to Shasta, faint and blue and almost imagined, floating above the haze in California. That is not a view you forget. The climb itself moves through zones. Forest, then the long open slog across the Lewis Glacier moraine, then the final scree push that goes on longer than seems fair. Start in the dark. I cannot stress this enough. The summit at sunrise is a different mountain than the summit at noon, and the afternoon light flattens everything that morning makes dimensional. Teardrop Pool sits just below the true summit, small and impossibly blue, and in early August it is still rimmed with snow. It does not photograph the way it feels. Almost nothing up there does. The scale defeats the lens, which is part of why I keep going back. Bring more water than you think. Bring a wide lens and a longer one for the distant peaks. And bring some willingness to make a quieter photograph than the summit panorama, because the honest images from this mountain are usually the smaller ones. A boot print in volcanic grit. The pool catching sky. The shadow of the peak thrown west across the Wilderness in the first hour of light.

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