2010-P Mount Hood

Mount Hood closed the 2010 ATB launch year, released November 15, 2010 as the program's first non-National-Park honoree. The site is a National Forest rather than a National Park, which made the design an early test of the Quarter Dollar Coin Act's broader scope: the legislation authorized honoring any federally protected site, not just parks. Phebe Hemphill's reverse pictures the mountain's iconic profile reflected in Lost Lake, with conifers framing the foreground and the peak rising at center. Philadelphia struck 34,400,000 pieces, putting the issue in the middle of the 2010 P-mint range. The inclusion of a National Forest in slot five gave the series an early signal that the 56-design run would cover a diverse federal-land portfolio.

Strike quality on the issue depends heavily on detail preservation in two areas: the mountain peak's snow-cap texture and the reflection in Lost Lake's surface. Both can flatten on late-die-state pieces, and the lake-reflection element in particular tends to lose definition before the peak does. Hemphill's second 2010 design (after Grand Canyon) shows her continued preference for layered foreground-middle-background composition rather than single-feature framing. The clad composition follows the standard formula: 75% copper-nickel outer layers over a pure copper core, 5.67 grams total weight, 24.26 mm diameter. PCGS (the Professional Coin Grading Service) and NGC handle the third-party grading market for slabbed examples.

The 2010-P Mount Hood is a Regular common date in collecting terms, with premiums building from MS67 upward and a steeper climb at MS68 where population reports thin. The design's status as the first non-National-Park ATB issue gives it modest extra interest among series specialists, though the price impact is negligible. Roll hunters in the Pacific Northwest still report occasional MS65 cherry-picks from original bank-wrapped rolls released through Portland and Seattle Federal Reserve branches. For the broader story of the ATB program, the 2008 authorizing legislation, and the series' design arc, see the Washington ATB series history.