Exposed Summit

A six-point SOTA on a Wednesday? You bet! The July 4th holiday made for a nice mid-week excursion to the hills to one of Washington's fourteen Goat Mountains. This one was twelve miles north of Mt. St. Helens.

After getting stopped at a closed forest road in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, we rerouted and arrived at the trailhead for Goat Mountain Trail #217 a little late. As soon as we stepped out of the Jeep, we knew that we were in for a bloody battle against the "skeeters." I think I was a pint low before I even started climbing.

Stats:
6.8 miles roundtrip
1761 ft elevation gain
Start elevation: 3463 ft
End elevation: 4962 ft

We parked at Falls Creek Horsecamp off Forest Road 65, about 16 miles north of Carson, WA. A call to the Gifford Pinchot National Headquarters a day earlier revealed 3-4 feet of snow at a berry patch just north of Red Mountain at a similar elevation. Begrudgingly, we attached our snowshoes to the back of our packs and then started out on Race Track Trail #171. After a short distance we encountered a kiosk that told us to bury our poop and fill out a wilderness use permit. We dropped a copy in the box and safely tucked away our copy for when a Ranger approached asking to see it.

This was really a spur-of-the-moment thing.  I saw the weather was going to be great on Friday, cleared a day off with the boss, and checked over my "portable station": My NorCal NC-20, EFHW tuner and 34' of wire.  Cobbled up a Li-ion battery, and looked over some summit possiblities.  I settled on West Tiger as not being too far away, or too ambitious for a first attempt. (But I wanted to do more than a 1-pointer!)  So I put an alert on SOTAwatch, and set 11:00am local as a start time.

As we headed back from Lakeview Peak earlier in the day, Taylor and I took a detour to go by Bandwidth Mountain. This two-point summit is not significant enough to have an official name, but like many in the Washington SOTA database, it has been assigned a cute amateur-radio name to avoid a simple numbering system. Our outdated topo map software showed a road leading in the direction of the summit, but stopping a couple miles short. However, some satellite reconnaissance ahead of time showed that the road actually went much farther, to just below the base of the summit.

The gate just past the Mount Bachelor ski area on the Cascade Lakes Highway opened just two weeks ago Friday - there is still plenty of roadside snow on the five miles from the ski area to the Devil's Lake trailhead. There's some shoulder cleared near the trail and a bit of space at the entrance to the trailhead parking lot - we bivyed there in the vehicle for the night and got ourselves up at 4am for a 5am start. There is no trail sign or anything to indicate where the trail starts - we scoped it out for bootprints in the snow during the last of the daylight the night before.

Taylor (K7TAY) and I went back to the Northern Columbia River Gorge area for yet another four-point summit in Southern Washington today. The weather was forecast for 70F in the valleys and clear skies; we were not disappointed.

Wanted to try out my gear so I hiked up this butte which is right behind my house. About 1000 ft straight up. No trail to speak of, just a lot of loose rock.  Set up my Buddipole and tuned it with a small analyzer. Operated 20m CW with my Elecraft K-1 and mini-paddles. Battery was an 1800mAh 12 volt model airplane Li-Po I had laying around the shop.  It wasn't until I quit that I realized I never used the auto-tuner in my K-1, so who knows how much my 5 watts was throttled down. I'll try to remember that next time.

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18 pt
18 pt
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A month and a half ago, Dan (KK7DS) and I attempted Silver Star Mountain on snowshoes from the north side. Sadly, we never made it to the summit due to strong gusts of wind that nearly blew me off the moutain :) Yesterday, we decided to approach it from the south side following the Grouse Vista Trail, a 6-mile roundtrip hike (here's a link to our GPS track). Our hope was that most of the snow would have melted since our last unsuccessful attempt.

First off - Chasers Rock! There was no way to self-spot and Phil - NS7P, found me and moved with me to 14.064-cw to get things started. And then, long after our QSO was done, Rich - N4EX, noted my QSY to 14.309-ssb and spotted me there. The climb of Mount St. Helens is different depending on the season - currently there is snow from trailhead to summit while late summer will find you on scree and pumice and rock the entire way. Myself, I prefer the great white stairmaster (snow), because I ski.