Walking home from school in Oakridge in winter sometimes I'd look back over my shoulder and there would be a rosy mountain looking back at me. Years later sometimes it would be clear enough to see that peak as I drove home from work and looked SE towards the Willamette Pass. Somewhere along the line I learned the name to go with the mountain, or what's left of it.
Our name for it is Diamond Peak. Named for one of the first settler to climb in 1852. John Diamond was part of a crew attempting to carve out another trail across the mountains. If the Native Amricans had a name for the mountain the settlers never found out. If anybody ever thought to ask. Because it sure as heck doesn't look like a diamond.
Although a winter scene can be pretty sparkly. That's what I saw walkiing home. Must have looked kind of funny. Me walking backwards yo catch the last of the light. Our valley was already in shadow.
It's no secret that the west coast's answer to tornados and hurricanes is volcanoes and earthquakes. Don't happen near as often but it can be spectacular. Hopefully more about that later. Diamond is classed as a shield volcano. With some small cinder cones the slopes. That's Mt. Yoran off to the left. It's hard to tell from the distance but Yoran's peak is almost one thousand feet lower than Diamond.
A modern example of the shield volcanos are the Hawaiian Islands. The lava is usually highly fluid and may flow from vents instead of cinder cones. Any one flow may not be that deep but over time it bulds up. After all the Pacific Ocean is more than two thousand feet deep around the islands and the peak of Mauna Loa is more than fourteen thousand feet above sea level.
Willamette Pass is over five thousand feet high and the cone of Diamond is over three thousand feet above that. That's after the last glaciers carved some off after the last eruption over eleven thousand years ago possibly ending a life time of say, ninety thousand years. Although the mountain is fairly heavily eroded I'm not sure if it can be classed as extinct. Very dormant perhaps.
The peak is part of a wilderness area that;s about fifty miles SE of Oakridge. It can be accessed from trails that begin near Summit Lake or cutoffs from the Pacific Crest Trail.
When I first discovered my mountain began its life as a volcano. Or that most of the Oregon we see today is the product of volcanos and lava flows.
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