Good Views From Summit

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.

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 Our outdated topo map software showed a road leading in the direction of the summit, but stopping a couple miles short.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.

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.

This summit is a fairly easy trip from the Eugene, OR area.  The 4.1 mile drive up to the trailhead is steep in places, but passible with a standard car.  The short (quarter mile) hike to the top is easy, and the top is broad and generally flat.

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.

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.

My Adventures in fitness and SOTA continue!  This was a fun one, spur of the moment decision to do it.  Hours drive to the trail head, hour up, 30 minutes operating, hour down and an hour drive home.  The view from the top was really nice and there was a ledge with a really good drop off as well!

GPX and Google Earth files here.

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18 pt
18 pt
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A month and a half ago, Dan (KK7DS) and I attempted Silver Star Mountain on snowshoes from the north side. Sadly, we never made it to the summit due to strong gusts of wind that nearly blew me off the moutain :) Yesterday, we decided to approach it from the south side following the Grouse Vista Trail, a 6-mile roundtrip hike (here's a link to our GPS track). Our hope was that most of the snow would have melted since our last unsuccessful attempt.

2011-09-11 Tamanos Mt. W7/RS-015 CN96EU89

Start elev.: 3791 ft (1155 m)
Max elev.: 6781 ft (2067 m)
Total ascent: 3096 ft (944 m)
Trip odometer: 10.6mi (17.059km) Up: 5.2mi (8.369km) Down: 5.4mi (8.690km)
Total time: 11h05m Up: 4h37m Down: 3h24m