A short hike to Mount Defiance in Oregon is from Wahtum Lake Road and is about 3.6 miles roundtrip with 1140 ft gain. From Dee near Hood River, it's about a 10-mile drive on FR 2820 to the Upper Mount Defiance trailhead.
Exposed Summit
Mt. Defiance - July 8, 2012
South Tiger Mountain, WA | July-2012
South Tiger Mountain is the easiest of a trio of peaks in the Tiger Mountain State Forest near Issaquah, Washington.
(Note of August 2018 - temporary closure of South Tiger Traverse - access from the north is still possible.)
I-90 Exit 25 for Highway 18 is the easiest way to reach the trailhead parking area. I've used the upper parking lot for two activations here - note that a Washington State Discovery Pass is required. There is an unattractive toilet at the upper parking lot.
Goat Mountain (no, the other one)
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.
Red Mountain Lookout
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.
First Activation - June 15
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.
Double Header Part 2: Bandwidth Mountain
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.
South Sister, OR | June-2012
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.
Three Corner Rock, WA
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.
First Activation. Leslie Butte
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.