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.
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.
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.
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.
Summary - 3566 (Mount Diode) is one of three peaks (LC-100, LC-091, LC-068) in the Northeast corner of Weyerhauser-owned land. It is roughly two and a half hours from Portland, much of it over logging roads that get rougher as you go higher. The summit is clear cut and covered with stumps and the best operating position is along the road. Don't count on two meters to make your four QSOs. Cell phone service is marginal, and APRS pings get picked up. There are good views of the surrounding hills.
Access:
Rainier National Park pass required, $30 per vehicle for the day. Nisqually Entrace is closest to I-5 and reached via Elbe WA. There are a number of routes to Lane Peak depending on road closures. Stevens Pass road closes for winter (even in the hottest October ever recorded). Parking available at several points along Paradise Valley Rd. We parked at the closure which is near Ruby Falls. This leaves you with about 1 mi of road walk before descending toward Tatoosh Creek directly toward Lane from the North of the peak.
Route:
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.