Treacherous Trail

This is a two pointer just outside of Plains Montana. It's a 13 mile drive on forest service roads and then a difficullt scramble over steep, heavily wooded terrain. Add to that the Forest Service cut down hundreds of juvenile trees two years ago in an attempt to eliminate potential fuel for fire prevention. You have to step over many many logs to get to the summit. The scramble is just about two thirds a mile so it's very doable. The view from the top is worth it. Cell coverage is excellent. Carry bear spray as we spotted one on the drive up.

Needle Point is the lowest 10 point summit in Oregon. It is not the easiest. It is located in the Eagle Cap Wilderness in north eastern Oregon. Access to the trail head is via Union, Oregon.

It is a nineteen mile round trip hike with 5000 feet of total elevation gain.

Mt Adams in summer is a popular climb and has variable conditions. Anyone attempting Adams should be familiar hiking with crampons and ice axe. Glissading skills will help and if you're new, you'll be an expert by the time you are down the mountain. 

Great Vistas from the Termination Point summit!

Termination Point was the site of a now abandoned FS Lookout.  Kreske's book says it was built in the 1930s but later abandoned.  The view of Adams, Rainier, and St Helens are majestic and with a little hike to the south, Mt Hood.  The summit is small, about 20' x 20' but with steep dropoffs to the east - great RF takeoff angles.

Round Top is a nice mostly drive up activation. Being me, I had to do it the hard way: Mountainbiking from Gale's Creek Campground. It is an 18 mile round trip ride with ~3000' elevation gain. 

I recommend doing some stretches or warmups before heading out because the hardest part of this ride is the first few miles: steep trail that gets the blood moving. Overall the trail is a singletrack and mostly follows the creek through the forest. Not much for views, but there are the occasional waterfall and views of Gale's Creek. 

This one-point summit is likely not worth the time driving 40 minutes RT on forest roads. In fact, the roads in this area are quite convoluted - I found it best to navigate using GPS with turn-by-turn directions. You may end up bushwacking through a tangle of coastal brush...or get lucky and find a way to the path visible on sattelite images that I found after the fact. Any "hike" might be less than 0.10 mile and several hundred feet of gain.

Muttonchop Butte, Oregon is west of the intersection of Highway 58 and Highway 97. The bushwack from the north was not pleasant, see if you can find the trail that leads to 0.5 mile west of the Quarry OHV area. Take Highway 58 4.2 miles from Highway 97 and turn left onto Road 5825.

On the last weekend of no permits a weather window opened up for an overnight hike & early morning activation of Mt St Helens. The trail was covered with snow to the parking lot. I hit the trail at 1:20am and made good time to chocolate falls on skis. Somewhere heading up the ridge I had to make the switch to bootpacking the skis. Heavier backpack, but faster travel overall. 

I activated W7Y/TT-086, AKA Steve Baugh peak, last summer. It's a beautiful summer hike with spectacular views of the Tetons. The approach is pretty moderate in summer or winter. I decided to do it again this winter and had a perfect, calm, bluebird day with specatacular views of the Teton range.

A friend from Eugene wanted to hit Mount McLoughlin in the winter and despite the drive distance from Beaverton, it looked like too beautiful a mountain to pass up. After picking up rental snowshoes from REI in Medford I made it to the Summit Sno-Park TH at sunset. Casey arrived shortly after and we made some quick dinner on our backpacking stoves then turned in for the night.