Earlier this week we visited Mount Hood for the first time with our trailer and its stunning beauty and welcoming energy made us start rethinking and reworking our plans for the next year.
October 5th, 2025
We had tent camped at Mount Hood several years ago but Sunday was the first time we took our trailer to Mount Hood. We knew it was a beautiful place but we were blown away by how stunning the area is in the fall: the colors up on the mountain were at their peak and we were delighted to see the first snowfall glistening on the volcano's peak during a sunny waterfall hike.
We all felt a calm, peaceful, welcoming energy at Mount Hood and realized that it has a feeling of home: a combination of the mountain ski town we grew up in and the deep Pacific Northwest forests we fell in love with when we made our home in western Washington. The Mount Hood Village campground is located right along the Salmon River and connects to the trail system at Wildwood Park and may quite possibly be our favorite campground yet.
Such an instant love for a place made us immediately pull up our location planning spreadsheet and start working in more time in Mount Hood. We book most of our campgrounds six months out and plan our routes at least as far in advance. We started dreaming about spring skiing at Mount Hood and rearranged our spring plans to prioritize that.
But spending more time at Mount Hood in the spring is not the only thing that our brief visit to this majestic mountain inspired. We learned about the Timberline Trail, a 38-mile hiking trail that circumnavigates Mount Hood, which we decided we want to do as a family in a few years when the kids are older. Dreaming about a long, multi-day backpacking trek pushed us to start backpacking with the kids now, which launched us into extensive gear and trail research.
And beyond all that, finding yet another location that we absolutely love and want to spend more time in several times a year made us start rethinking our winter stays in southern California, which are not as optimally located as many of the Oregon and central California campgrounds included in our Thousand Trails membership. The southern California locations are farther from the beach and from our family in the LA area, which means lots of driving and dealing with traffic. In a roundabout way, wanting to prioritize Hood among many other favorite places inspired us to book a 5 week long stay within walking distant of the beach in Oceanside this winter, which will put us closer to the beach and our baby niece.
Tomorrow morning we will be looking at a backpacking backpack for our oldest son that we found on Facebook marketplace, January will be spent walking to the beach in our favorite part of southern California and most likely our spring will be full of ski days on a volcano, all because of one 4 day stay at our new favorite place.