Quickly, after Old Scab I activate this plateau as well. So far the most-most easiest "hike", or more like a walk in a park. Driving only a mile further up from Old Scab trailhead I reach the top of the mountain. Here is a big open space. Park the car in the shade and start to collect this giveaway six point.
A very pleasant hike in the middle of summer. With lots of QSOs, nice weather and strong wind. As usual, I gathered information from Beckey’s book and of from the Internet for this summit too. The forest road opens from state route 410 and the upper section might require higher clearance. I think this summit is not visited very often, today I have not met with anyone.
After the long Iambic adventure I was looking for something easy and short. I choose Mount Wow, and read a lot of trip reports about the mountain. I had three choices to get onto the top. On the west ridge, from south following the old national park border trail, or from east using the Alan lake trail, which is also abandoned. At the end I decided to try it from west. This one is the shortest and most likely the easiest too.
I leave Seattle with grandiose plans. Three days, three eight pointer on the east side of the Cascades. This side is not that wet, as in theory Rainier blocks most of the moisture. Rainer rain shadow. Thus, trails melt out much more quicker over less snow. Forecast is quite bad for the first day, but all sunny for the rest. Again things turn out little different than planned originally.
The weather did not improve at all. It got worse actually. When I started from Kelly Butte trailhead started to drizzle. On the summit I got some sleet with strong wind. Luckily twenty meter was much better, but still in bad condition.
After my failure on Ararat, where I only made 3 Qs with my handheld radio on 144 MHz, I am looking for some easy summit. I can only blame myself, as I was too tired to assemble the Buddipole. If it is easy, then let’s do 3 or 4 summits straight away. As always, despite the long and thorough intelligence, things did not work out as planned at the first place. However, I bagged two summits out of the four, but let’s see the details.
After the two forest road summits, I have looked for something similar again. I have checked out the road after Divide Ridge. Then I was able to drive up to 3360 feet. The forecast for today is very promising, but next day some rain will come.
I could not go out for a long time. I had a lot of problems and was afraid of avalanche danger. Previous weekend I went out for an expedition hike towards Ararat peak. Avalanche danger was low, with declining tendency. Despite this I still did not want to go on any steep open terrain. Many would not think that even a small amount of snow can kill you.
I ordered a LiFePO4 battery, one what I wanted for a while. It is 12.8V and capable of deliver 26A. Capacity is 13.2Ah. This should be sufficient to operate the portable radios on maximum power. It weighs 1.9Kg. Now that I have a good battery, I do not want to carry the 897 any longer with the internal batteries. So it is time to get another radio, a lighter one. I looked around and at the end I decided on the 857. I think ICOM does not have any good SOTA capable radios. The 706 would be good, but cannot buy new it any longer, and I don’t want to wait for a good deal on eBay. I would not like to take the 7000 outdoors. Time to go down south into Oregon to buy a radio.
Start elev.: 4291 ft (1308 m)
Max elev.: 7324 ft (2232 m)
Total ascent: 3342 ft (1019 m)
Trip odometer: 11.4mi (18.347km) Up: 5.8mi (9.334km) Down: 5.6mi (8.012km)
Total time: 12h25m Up: 5h33m Down: 2h58m