Steve Wilent

By Steve Wilent, For The Mountain Times I recently had the pleasure of visiting Little Crater Lake, one of my favorite places on the Mt. Hood National Forest. The sun was shining, the air warm — t-shirt weather. But in a way it was a bit eerie: It was April 8 at about 3,000 feet in elevation, and there was no snow in sight. In most years, deep snow would make driving to the lake in April impossible. A woman walking her dog on the trail to the lake said, “It’s weird. We shouldn’t be here at...

By Steve Wilent, For The Mountain Times Years ago, Mt. Hood Community College’s Natural Resources Technology program hosted groups of students from Central America and the Caribbean seeking degrees and knowledge to take home with them. It was a joy and a privilege to have these students in my classes. I think I learned as much from these warm, smart young people as they did in their time at MHCC. One March, during a field exercise in the woods near the college, one of the students — from...

Years ago, Mt. Hood Community College’s Natural Resources Technology program hosted groups of students from Central America and the Caribbean seeking degrees and knowledge to take home with them. It was a joy and a privilege to have these students in my classes. I think I learned as much from these warm, smart young people as they did in their time at MHCC. One March, during a field exercise in the woods near the college, one of the students — from Guatemala or Honduras, I think — looked up...