Illumination Saddle

This side of Mount Hood is uggo, but I've been wanting to get up to Illumination Saddle for a while now and I'm stuck at home this weekend. I cheated and took the Magic Mile, then made my way fairly quickly up and over to ZigZag Glacier. There are some bootpaths through the scree, but I mostly just chose my own path to make it easier on my knees (long run yesterday). At the glacier, I followed some boot-tracks and stayed hiker's right/east. It looked like there might've been some small crevasses hiker's left/west closer to the pinnacle, so I hiked vertically for a while about thirty feet from the edge of the snowfield, and then traversed below Castle Crags, where some small boulders in my path made me a touch nervous. The sun cups I'd heard so much about were almost completely flat. Nearing Illumination Rock, the snow steepened sharply and I slipped a little in my microspikes climbing up to the saddle. I had to backtrack and kick in some steps, but nothing too tricky. The view of Reid Glacier was great from my little perch, but I made haste back down all the way back to the lodge, slipping and sliding and cursing through lava and litter. So, if anything, this short trip taught me that snow is better than scree and that after Spider Gap I'm no longer afraid of a little glacier. I will probably do this hike again in the early season when I have a good weather window.