Well, at least it’s not another Black Butte. It is also a nice road walk of 5 or 6 miles RT. The distance depends on whether you start at the turn off of the good gravel road or whether you bounce your way up ~0.3 miles to the gate. Elevation gain is 1000 or 800 ft respectively.
Access is via Willow Creek Road out of Heppner and then a left turn onto county road 798, also called NF-5326, aka Shaw Grade Road. This is a gravel super highway, so any car. The next turn is on NF-030. This requires high clearance and recommends AWD. But after 0.3 miles it is time to walk anyway.
The summit is a radio site and I had S-5 noise on 20 M, but was able to activate there. 2M is quieter although there is a 2M repeater up there. I called on it using a dummy load as an antenna. It seemed to work, but no contacts on 2M even with a real antenna.
I quit early as I had planned for it to be a drive up and was in a time crunch.
There are trees off of the summit, but in the AZ for antenna support.
