Mount Hood
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40 free Mount Hood trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Mount Hood is the snow-capped peak that fills the skyline east of Portland, a sleeping volcano that is also Oregon's highest point and a summit thousands of climbers attempt every year. People ski on it in midsummer, hike all the way around it, and stay in a hand-built lodge that film fans recognise at a glance. This quiz covers the mountain from every side: how it was built and what its eruptions left behind, how it got its English name and its legendary one, the wagon pioneers who struggled around its flank, the Depression-era craftsmen behind Timberline Lodge, and the ski lifts, glaciers, trails and rescue teams that make up life on the mountain today. It is written for Oregonians, visitors planning a trip, skiers, hikers and anyone hosting a Northwest trivia night. Every question comes with a short explanation, so you pick up the story behind each answer as you play.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood stood in for a haunted, snowbound hotel in which horror film?
The Shining
The Shining shows the lodge only from outside, and at the owners' request the film swapped the novel's haunted Room 217 for a non-existent 237 so guests would not avoid a real room.
Q 02Mount Hood ranks fourth among the peaks of the Cascade Range, so which volcano is the range's highest?
Mt. Rainier
Mt. Rainier tops the range at more than 14,000 feet, some 3,000 feet above Oregon's high point. California's Mt. Shasta comes second and Mt. Adams third.
Q 03Mount Hood, built up by eruptions over some 500,000 years, belongs to which steep-sided class of volcano?
Stratovolcano
Stratovolcano cones are piled up from lava domes, flows and ash, and scientists rate Mount Hood the Oregon volcano most likely to erupt again.
Q 04Samuel Hood, for whom Mount Hood was named in 1792, made his name in Britain as what?
An admiral
An admiral of the Royal Navy, Hood fought the American Revolution from the other side: in 1781 he sailed with the fleet that was driven off at the Chesapeake while trying to relieve Yorktown.
Q 05Which U.S. president dedicated Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in person, praising the relief workers who built it?
Franklin Roosevelt
Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the lodge in September 1937 as a monument to the skill of workers on relief rolls, and predicted that crowds would one day come for winter sports.
Q 06Which toll route, opened in 1846 around the south side of Mount Hood, became the last overland leg of the Oregon Trail?
Barlow Road
Barlow Road spared pioneers a dangerous raft trip, but at Laurel Hill the grade was so steep that wagons were lowered on ropes wound around trees.
Q 07Which village at the foot of Mount Hood is named for wagons abandoned there in 1849 on a hard mountain crossing?
Government Camp
Government Camp got its name from pioneers who found the wagons a U.S. Army mounted regiment had left behind after dozens of its mules starved on the mountain crossing.
Q 08Which pair of explorers reached the Sandy River in 1805 and found it choked with debris from Mount Hood's eruptions?
Lewis and Clark
Lewis and Clark named it the Quicksand River for its shifting bed, the washed-down remains of eruptions that had ended only about a decade before they arrived.
Q 09The town of Hood River, about 30 miles north of Mount Hood, bills itself as the world capital of which sport?
Windsurfing
Windsurfing set off the town's first tourism boom, kiteboarding followed, and the U.S. national championships have been held there several times.
Q 10The Hood to Coast relay starts at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood and ends on the sand in which Oregon town?
Seaside
Seaside throws the finish-line party after teams of twelve share 36 legs and nearly 200 miles, in a race that began in 1982 with just eight teams.
Q 11Geologists contrast Mount Hood's quieter, dome-building eruptions with the violent blasts of which Cascade neighbour?
Mt. St. Helens
Mt. St. Helens is known for explosive eruptions like its 1980 blast, whereas Mount Hood tends to pile up lava domes that collapse into hot avalanches and mudflows.
Q 12Before a wagon route opened around Mount Hood, Oregon Trail pioneers had to raft down which river from The Dalles?
The Columbia
The Columbia was a perilous and expensive last leg to Fort Vancouver, and in 1845 as many as sixty families faced a wait of more than ten days at The Dalles for a boat.
Q 13Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood was built in the 1930s by which New Deal jobs agency?
Q 21Mount Hood's summer ski season runs on a snowfield named for which pioneer, who scouted the slope in 1845?
Joel Palmer
Joel Palmer climbed high onto the glaciers that year to find a way down for stranded wagons, and the snowfield named for him now hosts ski and snowboard camps all summer.
Q 22Which future publisher of The Oregonian is credited with the first documented ascent of Mount Hood, in 1857?
Henry Pittock
Henry Pittock reached the top with four friends, three years after his own boss made a disputed claim to have got there first.
Q 23Which Portland mountaineering club was founded in 1894 by climbers who elected its first president atop Mount Hood?
The Mazamas
Works Progress Administration
Works Progress Administration crews hand-built the lodge, and about 80 percent of the building budget went on wages, with laborers paid between 55 and 90 cents an hour.
Q 14Which famous long-distance hiking route shares about eleven miles of path with the Timberline loop around Mount Hood?
Pacific Crest Trail
Pacific Crest Trail walkers follow the loop along the mountain's west side, on a path the Civilian Conservation Corps cut through the high meadows in the 1930s.
Q 15The 1920 Oregon Skyline route ran from Mount Hood to which landmark in the state's far south?
Crater Lake
Crater Lake was the far end of the original Skyline, a ridge-top path for hikers and riders that was later stretched to run the whole length of the state.
Q 16Which name from a legend of two rival chiefs is popularly used as an Indigenous name for Mount Hood?
Wy'east
Wy'east is a chief turned into the mountain in one telling of the Bridge of the Gods legend, yet scholars have found no evidence it was ever a genuine name for the peak in any Indigenous language.
Q 17In the early 1900s the Forest Service kept which unlikely structure on the very summit of Mount Hood?
A fire lookout
A fire lookout cabin perched on the summit gave a watcher a view over a vast sweep of forest, but the mountain's weather eventually destroyed it and nothing remains.
Q 18At the 1937 dedication lunch at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood, guests ate salmon and a pie of which mountain berry?
Huckleberry
Huckleberry pie was a local choice, since the berries grow wild in the forest around the mountain. The First Lady praised the lodge's huge timbers in her newspaper column.
Q 19USS Mount Hood, a Navy ship named for the Oregon peak, was lost in 1944 while carrying which cargo?
Ammunition
Ammunition in her holds detonated at anchor off Manus Island in November 1944, destroying the ship and leaving 45 confirmed dead and 327 missing.
Q 20Which Mount Hood resort, the closest to Portland, calls itself the largest night ski area in the United States?
Skibowl
Skibowl lights about two thirds of its 960 acres after dark, and it began life as two separate resorts that joined forces in 1964.
The Mazamas began that day when 193 people, 38 of them women, reached the top, and the club welcomed women as full members from the start.
Q 24The Crag Rats, the oldest volunteer mountain rescue team in the U.S., maintain which 1889 building on Mount Hood?
Cloud Cap Inn
Cloud Cap Inn is the oldest building on the mountain, a luxury climbers' hotel that had telephones by 1894 and closed as a business in 1946.
Q 25Mount Hood exists because which small ocean plate is sliding beneath the continent off Oregon and Washington?
Juan de Fuca
Juan de Fuca is the plate whose slow dive controls where the region's earthquakes and volcanoes occur, in a line from northern California to southern Canada.
Q 26A climber exploring Mount Hood's ice caves in 1934 became the Cascades' first known volcanic fatality; what killed him?
Oxygen-poor air
Oxygen-poor air filled the caves, which had been melted into the glacier by volcanic gas vents that still steam near the summit today.
Q 27On Mount Hood's popular south climbing route, the Hogsback ridge leads up to which famous gap in the summit rocks?
Pearly Gates
Pearly Gates is the final gateway to the summit plateau, on a route that is the mountain's easiest but still demands ropes, ice axes and crampons.
Q 28Before a pioneer campaigned to rename it after Mount Hood, the Hood River was known by the name of which animal?
Dog
Dog River is said to recall a party of starving travellers who ate dog meat, a name locals disliked so much that a settler's wife talked them into changing it.
Q 29Mount Hood appears on a 2010 U.S. quarter, pictured in the distance beyond which body of water?
Lost Lake
Lost Lake is said to owe its name to a hunting guide who had worked the area for years without finding it, until Native Americans showed him the way.
Q 30Snowy shots of Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood doubled as a Bavarian ski resort in which 1960s wartime sitcom?
Hogan's Heroes
Hogan's Heroes was set in a German prisoner-of-war camp, so Oregon's best-known ski lodge had to pass for the Alps in several episodes.