Cuddy Mountain, W7I/SR-055, is ALMOST a drive up summit, if your vehicle can handle it. The road to Cuddy and Summers requires careful driving, high clearance, and 4WD certainly helps. I was glad we gave an extra day for the snow to melt out because there were a couple spots that would've been more difficult to get through in the Explorer if it had been deeper. A couple mud pits looked suspect, but be made it through okay. The roads up here are frequented by off road enthusists and you'll likely see some UTVs, ATVs, and dirt bikers. The last stretch of road was blocked by snow for us and I parked us on a slopey meadow. With a nice big rock shoved under a wheel as an extra parking brake, we headed up the road to the trailhead.
The "trail" is a half mile double track that rises a net 200'ish gain to the summit. The summit is broad and treeless. After signing the summit register, I raised a rollup j-pole on my mast and started calling CQ. From Cuddy, my signal was able to reach west Boise and I had enough of a pileup I had to QSY to 146.58 to work through it. It seemed like there was quite a bit of excitement on 146.52 because stations on the east side of Boise couldn't hear me. After eight 2m QSOs, I got HF set up.
40m has been my go-to band lately and I started there. Compared to the previous day, my cw copy was much better. It felt really good to make these cw QSOs. I got 7 on 40m in about a half hour. I didn't want to keep the YL waiting too long and there's no shade on the summit, so with that I packed up. This activation was my first FA and I passed 100 SOTA points!
This is a great summit if you are in the area and want to do some VHF work. Summers Point (W7I/SR-060) is nearby, but we didn't have time to activate it too on this outing. Seems like an obvious pairing if you have the time.
