On Mount Hood is a contemporary, first-person narrative biography of Oregon's greatest mountain, featuring stories full of adventure and tragedy, history and geology, people and places, trivia and lore. The mountain itself helps create the notorious Oregon rains and deep alpine snows, and paved the way for snowboarding in the mid 1980s. Its forests provide some of the purest drinking water in the world, and its snowy peak captures the attention of the nation almost every time it wreaks fatal havoc on climbers seeking the summit. On Mount Hood builds a compelling story of a legendary mountain and its impact on the people who live in its shadow, and includes interviews with a forest activist, a volcanologist, and a para-rescue jumper. Jon Bell has been writing from his home base in Oregon since the late 1990s. His work has appeared in Backpacker, The Oregonian, The Rowing News, Oregon Coast, and many other publications. He lives in Lake Oswego, OR.
The author of On Mount Hood: A Biography of Oregon's Perilous Peak, Jon Bell has been writing from his home base around Portland, Oregon, since the late 1990s. A freelance writer full-time, he is the co-author of the climbing guidebook, Ozone, and he has been a business writer for the Portland Tribune, an award-winning reporter and photographer, and a contributing writer to such publications as Backpacker, The Oregonian, Oregon Business, The Portland and Puget Sound Business Journals, Oregon Coast, The Rowing News, The Home Building News, and The Portland Physician Scribe.
After growing up in Mansfield, Ohio, he got a bachelor's degree in history from Michigan State University, then traveled extensively across the American West before landing in Portland. An avid outdoorsman, his first published pieces were about some of his backpacking and climbing excursions in the Northwest. He subsequently broadened his writing experience to include public education, government, business, politics, and people and places of interest for several different newspapers and magazines.
He lives in Lake Oswego, OR, with his wife, two children, and his black Lab.
