Good Parking At Trailhead

Full report at https://kc7ujo.blogspot.com/2022/11/activation-report-w7oce-068-pine.html

Full trip report at https://kc7ujo.blogspot.com/2022/11/activation-report-w7oce-188-lava-butte.html

Skalkaho gets its name from the area in Salish meaning ‘many trails’.  Unrelated to the name, the summit does have several trails converging near its summit.  I chose the trail coming from the west off FS road #364.  This trail has many views of other SOTA summits and to the west the much higher elevation Bitterroot Range.

Summary - Lakeview Peak is on Weyerhauser's Longview land north of Yale and is accessed through a gate on Rock Creek Road. The drive to the gate is roughly eighty minutes. From the gate  to the summit is another 2.5 miles and a 1400 foot climb along logging roads.  Don't count on two meters to make your four QSOs. Cell phone service is marginal, and APRS pings get picked up.

Palisade Mountain is a popular hike east of Corvallis, MT. The trail system is well maintained to within 500’ of the summit. The summit is a large talus rock pile with a several oddly-located whitebark pine trees.  Evidence of the 1930s lookout still exist as some rock work and old trails in the talus. The main trail does not go to the summit though a semi-improved travel way in the talus on the west side does.

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.

There is an activation report link from Doug (N7NGO) on the SotaMaps Summit summary that is basically the information for driving access and the summit hike. Since there is not a PNWSota report, I thought I'd add a few notes.

The access road(s) are very well graded and certainly Prius friendly, whether coming to the City of Rocks National Reserve from the east (Almo, Idaho) or from the north (Oakley, Idaho).

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.

This was the first activation of Middle Stack Mountain in Nevada.  A huge lesson learned (again) is that map resources conflict when it comes to roads, both roads that do not exist, and roads that do not appear on maps. Even when cross referencing maps with Google Earth you can’t be certain that a geological feature that “looks” like a road actually is one!  As a first activation, there was no SOTA summit access information, though there were a couple of Peakbagger trip reports.