Page:Motoring Magazine and Motor Life February 1915.djvu/22

20

The distinction of having piloted the first automobile past Rhododendron Inn and on toward Mount Hood in the month of January was won quite innocently by Robert A. Hudson recently.

Bundled up in Hudson's car, Mr. and Mrs. Hudson and Mr. and Mrs. Ben A. Bellamy slid out of town at 10 o'clock Sunday morning, aiming in the general direction of Mount Hood. They now admit frankly that they didn't expect to get there, but they were starting on a sort of dare expressed at a dinner party the night previous.

"Ben, let's go to Mount Hood to-morrow," Hudson had ventured good-naturedly.

"We'd never get there in a hundred years," was the reply.

But just for the lark of the thing they agreed that they would make a dash at it anyhow.

The trip came near the end of the long cold spell which Portland experienced during the greater portion of last month, and consequently the roads were as hard, though not as smooth as pavement. Such a time, when both dust and mud are entirely unknown quantities on the road leading to Mount Hood is indeed rare.

"There certainly were a great plenty of chuckholes," recounted Hudson. "But by keeping one wheel in the middle of the road and the opposite one near the outer edge of the highway the trip was really actually easier for the careful driver than many I have taken in the middle of summer. In fact, I have been over nearly every foot of road in Oregon, but I must say that my recent trip to Mount Hood was the best I have ever taken, not excepting drives to Newport, Tillamook and up the McKenzie."

After three hours of driving out of Portland, the daring party was past Rhododendron Inn and within three miles of Government Camp, on Mount Hood. Even then, if they hadn't been "so blooming hungry," as Hudson expressed it, and been drawn back to the inn for eats, they could have made the camp easily, they say.

Hudson first struck snow about four miles this side of Welches, and the machine was plowing through a fall of four or five inches when it was ordered about face to answer the call of the human appetite.

At the inn they were delighted with the information given by the keepers that their car was the first to reach that point as early in the year as January. To make their fame certain, they examined the register and found that no automobile party had ascended that high in January. Nearly a year ago, in February, Walter Giffard, then automobile reporter on The Oregonian, with a party of automobile men broke all records for priority of