Once a 200-Foot-Thick Glacier, the Palmer Snowfield at Timberline Lodge, OR, Is Bare Again This Fall

The Palmer Snowfield above Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood, Oregon, has all but vanished this fall. Satellite imagery shows its lower half bare weeks earlier than last year.

• Related: This is How Current Glacier Health and the Future of Year-Round Skiing in the Oregon Cascades Looks

On October 7, KGW meteorologist Rod Hill posted on Facebook that the Palmer was “nearly completely snow-free for the first time since Timberline Lodge opened.” He called it a clear sign of regional warming beyond last winter’s thin snowpack and noted the snowfield has been shrinking in late summer and early fall for decades.

• Related: Low Snowpack Likely to Cut Summer Ski Season at Timberline, OR, Short in 2026

What Satellites Show About the Palmer Snowfield

The Palmer lost about 70% of its late-August snow and ice compared with 2025, according to an analysis of European Space Agency Sentinel-2 imagery published October 8 by the HikeIt blog. Both years had a clear satellite pass on August 24, allowing a like-for-like comparison.

On that date, the Palmer zone held 29 acres of snow and ice, down from 96 acres in 2025. The lower Palmer was hit hardest, shrinking from 28 acres to just 1.2 acres, a 96% drop. Across Mt. Hood, snow and ice cover fell 44%, from about 1,500 acres to about 850.

In other words, the whole mountain held about as much snow and ice on August 24, 2026, as it had on September 23, 2025. That puts this year’s melt roughly a month ahead of last year’s.

Snow fell around September 8 and again around September 28, melting back within days each time. The October 3 pass showed no detectable snow in the lower Palmer. Only about 5 acres remained near the top of the zone, likely fresh late-September snow.

The author notes some limits. The 33-foot pixels can miss thin or dirty snow, buried dead ice is invisible from space, and cloud cover hid Mt. Hood for much of September.

Not the First Time: The Palmer Snowfield Has Melted Before

The Palmer has melted out, or come very close, at least twice this decade, and Timberline itself has said these conditions aren’t new.

• 2020: Agnarchy reported that the Palmer had melted out that fall. It later added a note that Timberline had confirmed the snowfield had melted out before.
• 2023: In “The Palmer Snowfield on Mt. Hood, OR, is All but Gone”, SnowBrains reported that the snowfield was nearly completely melted by late September. In an email exchange with SnowBrains, John Burton, Timberline’s Director of Marketing, said: “Today, September 22, the snowfield is almost gone. We have experienced these conditions before, but with more frequency in recent years.” A Mt. Hood splitboarder watching the Timberline webcam described the Palmer as basically gone by mid-September. On October 1, he was skiing a few inches of new snow over bare glacial till.

The science points the same way. A supplement to a 2024 study of Mt. Hood’s glaciers in The Cryosphere says the Palmer became a seasonal snowfield by 2023, melting out each late September to October despite Timberline’s snow farming. Even 2025 came close: by September 28, days before the first fall snow, the lower Palmer was down to under an acre.

The HikeIt author reaches the same verdict. In his words, the Palmer is gone earlier and more completely than last year, but “probably not” for the first time.

Timberline Lodge dates back to the 1930s, when President Roosevelt dedicated it on September 28, 1937, and it opened to the public on February 4–5, 1938.

Why 2026 Hit So Hard

A historically poor winter set up this year’s early melt. As SnowBrains reported in April, Timberline had a base depth of 66 inches at 6,000 feet and 297 inches of snowfall for the season, compared with an annual average of 400 inches. According to an update from Mt. Hood Summer Ski Camps, the resort was targeting a July 19, 2026, closing date because of below-average snowpack on Mount Hood.

SnowBrains Senior Staff Writer Brent Glogau skied the Palmer on June 19 and wrote: “Timberline typically stays open until August, but with the historically low snowfall year across the Western U.S. this year, the resort is aiming to stay open only until July 19.” Timberline ended lift-served summer skiing on July 19 as planned.

That was about a month earlier than any of the previous three summers. Lift-served skiing on the Palmer ended on August 17 in 2025, August 18 in 2024, and August 18 in 2023.

Timberline has no snowmaking and relies solely on natural snow, so the length of each summer season depends entirely on the winter before it.

Decades of Decline on the Palmer Snowfield

The Palmer used to be a real glacier. According to the Oregon Glaciers Institute, the USGS measured it at almost 200 feet thick in 1981. By the mid-1980s it had stopped flowing, which means the glacier died in that decade. Today the Institute lists its status as “gone.”

The rest of the mountain is following. The 2024 Cryosphere study found Mt. Hood’s glaciers had lost about 17% of their 2015–16 area and about 39% of their 1981 area by 2023. Area loss since 2015–16 ran about 2.6 times faster than from 1981 to 2015–16.

The researchers tied this to summer heat, not snowfall. Regional summers in 2013–2023 averaged 1.7–1.8°C warmer than the early 1900s, while winter precipitation showed no matching decline.

Any single year still reflects weather, and 2026’s poor winter did much of the damage. Timberline also pushes snow onto the Palmer to stretch its season, so the snowfield isn’t a purely natural record. The climate signal is in the trend: a snowfield that was a nearly 200-foot-thick glacier in 1981 has now melted out or nearly so in 2020, 2023 and 2026.

What It Means for Summer Skiing at Timberline

The Palmer is why Timberline can claim the only lift-served summer skiing in North America, and why race teams and freestyle camps train there every July. A bare Palmer in October doesn’t end that. Mt. Hood summer skiing has always run on what the previous winter leaves behind. Winter snow rebuilds the surface each year, and Timberline will farm as much of it onto the Palmer as it can.

Those who know the mountain best have watched the season shrink. “It is the perfect example of climate change. We used to always stay open until Labor Day, but those days are long gone,” Gordon Garlock, a ski instructor at Timberline for 49 years, told SnowBrains in 2024.

What’s shrinking is the margin. With the glacier long dead and only a remnant of buried ice left, each summer season now depends on the winter before it. A big winter can still deliver August skiing. A lean one, like 2025–26, now means a July finish and a bare snowfield by early fall.