A legendary Oregon ski resort known for holding snow even in midsummer has closed for the rest of the season after a wildfire forced a Level 3 evacuation, capping a brutal year that already cut its ski season short.
Mt. Hood Meadows, perched on Mount Hood about 70 miles east of Portland, announced Tuesday that it would not reopen this summer. The Grasshopper Fire, a lightning-caused blaze first reported at 7:41 p.m. on July 23, triggered a Level 3 "go now" evacuation order that left the resort no choice but to lock its gates and hand its parking lot over to firefighters.
By Friday afternoon, the fire had scorched nearly 87,000 acres and sat at roughly 20 percent containment. More than 1,800 personnel, 45 firefighting crews, 135 engines, and 11 helicopters were deployed against it, according to a National Interagency Fire Center situation report. Six homes and 15 other buildings had already been lost, the Wasco County Sheriff's Office reported Wednesday, and officials warned that full damage assessments would have to wait while active suppression continued.
For the resort's president and general manager, Greg Pack, the closure was the second gut punch in a single year. Low snowpack had already forced Mt. Hood Meadows to end its ski season early. Now the summer season is gone, too.
Pack told OregonLive the hit was real:
"It's definitely a double-whammy. There's been a decent financial impact."
He added that the resort is not in financial peril, crediting low debt and careful management. But the lost revenue from two shortened seasons is a blow that no balance sheet absorbs painlessly.
Rather than simply board up, Pack offered the resort's parking lot as a "spike camp", a forward staging area, for more than 300 firefighting personnel. He urged the public to respect evacuation orders and stay out of zones closed by firefighters and the U.S. Forest Service.
Mt. Hood Meadows posted its closure announcement on Facebook, striking a tone that mixed disappointment with resolve:
"We understand that this decision has a real impact on our guests, and especially our Team, and we want everyone to know we did not take this decision lightly. This is not how we wanted our summer to go, but if there is one thing we are really good at, it is making the best out of a tough situation."
The resort said it was "stoked to welcome everyone back up here once the snow falls" this winter.
At a community meeting Thursday night in Dufur, a small town in Wasco County, Sheriff Lane Magill did not hold back about the scale of the emergency. He called the Grasshopper Fire:
"One of the most challenging fires that I've had from an evacuation standpoint in probably the last ten or 15 years."
Evacuation notices stretched across parts of three counties, Hood River, Wasco, and Clackamas, a geographic spread that underscores how fast the fire moved and how thinly resources were stretched.
Rachel Brozobich of the Oregon State Fire Marshal's Blue Incident Management Team explained at the same meeting that high winds in recent days had fed the fire fresh energy. The blaze, which lightning sparked on July 23, grew explosively in conditions that fire officials had been dreading all summer.
Jean Nelson-Dean, a public information officer with the Northwest Coordination Center, laid out the broader context in comments to KATU:
"We know that 96 percent of Oregon or the northwest is in drought; some areas in a really severe drought, so we were anticipating that this was going to be a very tough year."
"Tough" turned out to be an understatement. Oregon has now burned more than 2.3 million acres in the 2026 wildfire season, surpassing the previous record set just two years ago in 2024.
Gov. Tina Kotek signed an executive order on July 29 to give the state fire marshal greater resources to fight the Grasshopper Fire. That was six days after the blaze started. Two weeks later, the fire had quadrupled in size and was still only one-fifth contained.
An Australia and New Zealand Incident Management Team arrived Tuesday, the same day the resort announced its closure, to assist with firefighting operations. Team members were deployed as firefighters, helibase managers, and chainsaw specialists. The international reinforcements speak to the strain on domestic firefighting capacity during a record-setting season.
Marilyn Ronfeld, a longtime county resident, captured the personal cost at the Dufur community meeting. She called the blaze "devastating" and said it was scorching places she had been "playing in for 40 years."
Six homes gone. Fifteen buildings destroyed. A resort shuttered for the year. Thousands of acres of forest reduced to ash. And the fire is still burning, with damage assessments on hold because the crews fighting the flames cannot spare the time to count what has already been lost.
Mt. Hood Meadows occupies a rare niche in American skiing, a resort high enough on an 11,000-foot volcano to hold snow even in the heat of summer. That distinction made its closure all the more striking. The mountain did not run out of snow this time. It ran out of safe air.
Pack's decision to convert his shuttered resort into a firefighting base camp was the right call, and it drew no public criticism. But the broader picture is harder to shrug off. Oregon is in the grip of a drought that covers 96 percent of the state or the broader Northwest, according to the coordination center. The wildfire season has already shattered records. And the infrastructure to fight these fires, more than 1,800 personnel, international reinforcements, a governor's executive order, has so far managed to contain only a fifth of a single blaze.
When 96 percent of your state is parched and your worst fire year on record gets broken two years later, the question is not whether another resort or another town will face the same choice Mt. Hood Meadows just made. The question is when.
