Dome Shaped Mountain is a scenic and lightly traveled trail near Hamilton Montana. Much of the hike overlooks a large portion of the Stony Mountain Roadless Area. Alpine larch dominate the summit with brilliant yellow fall color in early October contrasting with green whitebark pine.
SOTA Summit 7560 could easily be termed “Magruder Ridge High Point”. It is located on Magruder Ridge approximately 1.0 mile south of Magruder Mountain that it dominates by a mere 138’. Magruder Mountain and Ridge are named for the massacre of Lloyd Magruder and his party of four others in 1863 near this area. See sign photo.
Long Tom Mountain is a long forest road drive mostly through burned forest. The current Long Tom Lookout built in 1977 is ½ mile south of the SOTA summit.
Devils Point is a mostly open snag-covered summit with excellent views of the surrounding Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness and the Hell’s Half Acre Lookout. Much of this area has experienced very large wildfires over the last several of decades and abundant snags exist.
Rock Candy Mountain is an old US Forest Service Lookout site. The summit views are great with cliff cirque basins full of chipmunks, golden-mantle squirrels and chirping pikas, and distant high peaks of the Cabinets Mountains to the south, the Selkirk Mountains to the west and into Canada to the North.
Mount Baldy summit has a Forest Service Lookout tower and a multi-agency communication site for the NW corner of Montana. There are good views from the summit including high mountains of the Cabinets Mountains to the south, the Selkirk Mountains to the west and into Canada to the North.
This summit became accessible to the public 2021 thanks to the hard work by a lot of individuals, Private Landowners, The Five Valley Land Trust, Nature Conservancy and the City of Missoula. The summit is private property and contains numerous communications towers. However, the new public access trail provides access to near the Activation Zone.
This summit is the old Horseshoe Lookout Site. It had a primitive platform on a rock pinnacle from 1921-1961. A standard L-4 structure, 1962-1983. Both structures succumbed to wildfires and were not rebuilt. Concrete blocks from the L-4 lookout remain. The access road, USFS #588 is 4 miles off FS #500.
Indian Post Office is an intriguing name given to a rounded high point qualifying as a SOTA summit along the Nee Me Poo, a trail of the Nez Perce and the Lewis and Clark trail. I searched the few vertical rock outcrops looking for what I thought might be pictographs or petroglyphs. I found neither. I did see a large rock cairn linked to folklore.
This summit is just off the Lolo Motorway that roughly follows along the Nee Me Poo Trail of the Nez Perce and the Lewis and Clark Trail. The Lolo Motorway, USFS #500 is a narrow mostly ridgetop road built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. It provides access to over a dozen SOTA summits along its route that are mostly a short hike.