By Ty Walker, The Mountain Times
Longtime Mount Hood resident Molly Espenel looks back on memories of her childhood in Government Camp with a good sense of humor. She is full of stories painting a colorful picture of the rustic life she lived growing up in the cabin her father built among the evergreens.
Molly, a library clerk at the Hoodland Library, shared a few of those stories during an interview with The Mountain Times as part of its “I remember when” feature series. She and her husband Jim have lived in the Rhododendron community for the past 48 years.
“I have lots of fond memories of Government Camp,” Molly said.
Molly remembers when she learned how to cook on a Franklin wood stove, which she also used for making hot water. The small cabin her dad built in 1956 didn’t have indoor plumbing until she was a teenager. She was just only a youngster when her mother died.
She had a great view of the picturesque Mount Hood framed by her loft window. As a child with an active imagination, she was afraid the volcano would erupt, so her dad put a ladder outside the window for her to escape in such emergencies.
The oldest of three children, Molly and her younger brother and sister were on skis by the time they were toddlers and could walk. Their father was a civil engineer and avid skier who did surveying work for Ski Bowl and Mt. Hood Meadows. So his kids got to ski for free until they were adults.
Before she was able to ski, dad would carry Molly in a rucksack on his back when he went skiing down the mountain. But sometimes he wanted to go solo and ski without her as a burden.
“When he wanted to ski without me, he used to hang me in the rucksack from a branch on a tree, take a run, and come back and get me when he was done,” Molly said, laughing. “It was pretty funny, right? I mean you couldn’t do that now.”
But their father taught them well and all three kids were up and skiing on their own at Ski Bowl by the time they were two or three years old. Molly doesn’t ski these days, but remains active hiking, biking, snowshoeing and gardening.
Molly remembers a New Year’s skiing tradition her family kept throughout their years at Government Camp. “On New Year’s Eve we would throw a turkey in the wood burning stove and my dad would take us to Timberline,” Molly said. “We would all ski the Alpine Trail with lanterns and flashlights back to the house. By that time, the turkey would be finished.”
Summertime was full of good times on the mountain as well.
“When Collins Lake was actually Collins Lake, we would raft out to the island and hang out,” Molly said. “It was a fun place to explore. We were free to roam. We would pick huckleberries for hours then gorge on them in our tree house.”
Another favorite pastime she enjoyed as the weather warmed and ski season came to a close involved coins and grape Nehi soda. Remember Nehi?
“When the Summit closed for the season, we would look for coins that had fallen out of people’s pockets,” Molly said. “The sun would melt just enough so they would sink in the snow and we would find coins. There was a little lady who sold Nehi out of a cooler at the bottom of the Summit. We would spend the coins we would find and have a grape Nehi, sit on a rock and hang out.”
Molly also remembers there being more snow when she was growing up in Government Camp than there is these days.
“I do believe we had more snow,” she said. “I don’t remember the Ski Bowl having to be closed as much as it is now due to lack of snow. We always had to walk up to our house in the winter because the roads weren’t plowed.”