I met John because of the bike.  We both commute to work a lot and we both live in the same neighborhood.  We’d run into each other often on the way to or from work.  That led to riding together and chit chatting  and then doing some road and mountain bike rides together.

John decided for his 50th birthday to go big!  He rented Silcox Hut up on Mt Hood and invited a bunch of friends up to celebrate.  We all arrived at Timberline Lodge on Friday afternoon for the ride up to Silcox via snowcat.

Now I’ve heard a lot of glowing remarks about Silcox Hut.  This of course set some pretty high standards in my mind.  Well the truth is that it exceeded what I expected.  The building is gorgeous and has so many little details that make it just so special.

An employee stays up at the lodge with the guests and basically pampers the heck out of all of you.  All the cooking, taking care of the fire, etc was taken care of while we all got to know each other.  John was the only one who knew everybody so he handed out some papers to everyone with interesting fun facts about everyone else.  The goal and ice breaker was to associate a name with the fact.  It was a smart move and a good way to have us all interact.  I’m good in small groups but I can sometimes be a bit of a wall flower/observer in larger groups.

When you’re standing at 7,000′ looking up towards the summit it looks so close.  Truth of the matter is that it is still over 4,000 vertical feet.  One of these days I will be standing on that thing!

We could not have asked for better weather on John’s birthday.  The sun was out for the first time in a long time and the views from the hut were spectacular.

I didn’t take any shots of the sleeping quarters.  They aren’t bad but they are fairly spartan and a bit tight.  I slept okay after hitting the hay around 11:30pm.  I was up around 6:15am so I could get some shots of the sunrise.  Staying true to the being pampered theme there was coffee already made for us too.

By 8:30-9am the clouds and snow had moved in and visibility was greatly reduced.  I’m glad I got up early to catch what I did.  Definitely very beautiful up there that early in the morning.

Breakfast was a pretty good deal too.  Cereal, fruit, yogurt, waffles, juice, coffee, etc.  Again all prepared for us!

I want to thank John for inviting me along.  It was a fun time and you definitely have an eclectic group of friends.  If I can convince some of Mia and my families to pony up some funds for something like this we should definitely look into renting Silcox Hut for a little Rhodes/Daniels family get together.

Thanks for reading,

-Pete