Hiking time: 417 minutes and 35.94 seconds, or 6 hours and 58 minutes. My goal was to take the long (but not hazardous) way to McNeil Point, but there was so many 15 foot high packed snow drifts that not only I, but a lot of other hikers, just turned back. I turned back at the small waterfalls on the Timberline Trail that looks like a miniature Ramona Falls. The correct timing for this hike is late July and I'd like to return for the same hike then.

Stupidly, I did not bargain for all this leftover winter snow. Stupidly, because I have years of experience of how the winter's snow lingers in the high country. But for some reason, I got the impression that there wasn't as much precipitation in the mountains this year as in a normal year and that I wouldn't encounter snow. I also looked up recent trip reports on this hike and no one mentioned any snow! Either the trip reports lied, or I didn't pay close enough to their dating. The last time I photographed this route was 13 years ago.

Took 176 photos of which 115 made the cut. In spite of my plans being truncated, this was a spectacular hike.

Met a French Canadian from Montreal on the way back and we hiked together almost back to the Top Spur trailhead. But time was running short for him so he took off when we were about half way down the Top Spur Trail back to the car. A couple minutes after he left me, I fell! It must have been fatigue. I guess my feet got tangled up in roots, and I was having great difficulty getting up. Someone came along half my age and helped me up. Amazingly I didn't hurt a thing! However, the setting on the camera that lets me change the ISO was stuck on 200 and I thought I'd injured the camera! That would have been horrible! But when I got back, I did a master reset on the camera and everything started working again! Even the depth of field preview button, which no one had any answer for me up on DPreview.

The weather was utterly fantastic! It was so cool that I wore my thick black pullover shirt the whole hike. But I also wore shorts and this time I put sunscreen on (#70! They didn't even have that the last time I was "into" sunscreen), so didn't get burned to a crisp in the fierce sunlight at 5,300 feet. The air was crystal clear and I got fabulous photos of Mt. Hood with my fisheye, 12-40mm, and 75-300mm.

Fisheye corrections are not noted in this gallery and I never show before and after shots. Sometimes the correction wasn't as good as the original fisheye and so I just show the fisheye with no comments about it.