- Oregon County HP: #27
- Difficulty: ⭐️ (on a scale of 5)
- Summit Elevation: 3,432 feet
- Mountain Range: Oregon Coast Range
- Ancestral Lands: Nestucca, Atfalati; Tillamook; Confederated Tribes of the Siletz; Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde; and Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla
PLANNING DETAILS
Location: Trask Mountain is located in the eastern portion of the Oregon Coast Range, approximately 55 miles southwest of Portland. The closest small town is Yamhill, Oregon.
When to Visit: Due to logging truck activity, visits to Trask Mountain are generally limited to weekends. The ideal time to visit is in the autumn hunting season, when Weyerhaeuser opens the gate at the entrance of Trask Toll Road to the public. Visitors arriving outside hunting season must either: (1) park outside the locked gate and make the 22-mile (round-trip) trip to the summit via non-motorized means (bicycle, foot, etc); or (2) follow one of the alternate routes described at the end of this post.
Fees/Permits Required: This high point sits amid a patchwork of public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and private logging land controlled by Weyerhaeuser. Recreation permits are not required to visit Trask Mountain, but driving on Trask Toll Road is only possible during western Oregon’s deer/elk hunting season when Weyehaueser unlocks the gate for non-logging vehicle traffic.
Getting There: Trask Mountain is most easily accessed from the east side via Trask Toll Road, a well-maintained dirt logging road approximately 8 miles west of Yamhill, Oregon.
Directions from Yamhill:
- At the north end of Yamhill, turn onto NW Pike Road and drive west for 4.4 miles.
- At NW Rocky Rockyford Road, turn left, and then make an immediate right (200 feet later) onto NW Old Railroad Grade Road, a well-graded dirt road.
- Follow NW Railroad Grade Road west for 3.6 miles to the junction with NW Oak Ridge Road. Stay right at this intersection to remain on NW Railroad Grade Road heading toward Camp Yamhill.
- After you pass Camp Yamhill, continue 0.7 miles until you reach the Y-junction with NW Fairdale Road and Trask Toll Road.
- Veer right to take Trask Toll Road, and follow the logging road for 12 miles until you reach the large flat area where the logging trucks turn around just below the top of Trask Mountain.
Parking: There is no designated parking for this high point. However, there is a large, flat logging truck turnaround area about 0.5 miles below the summit with room for dozens of vehicles to park. The closest amenities (bathrooms, water, trash) are in Yamhill.
Pets Allowed: There are no signs prohibiting animals. However, the final 0.5 mile from the parking area to the summit will require some cross-country travel and may involve potential hazards.
Kid Friendly: The route up to this high point is relatively short, but it includes off-trail navigation, logging debris, and other hazards that may be unsuitable for young children.
Hiking Distance: 1 mile round-trip.
The Summit: Trask Mountain’s summit has a broad clearing completely encircled by tall evergreen trees. There is no survey marker, summit log, or views from this high point. However, there are some remains from the concrete footings of the old fire lookout tower. A crow’s nest fire lookout was first built atop the summit in 1916, and replaced by a 65-foot tower and cab in 1934 when a caretaker’s cabin was added. These structures were removed by 1996.
TRIP SUMMARY
Date Visited: November 2, 2025
Route Used: Trask Toll Road and cross-country travel – 0.97 miles (round-trip)
Highpointing is a hobby of dogged persistence. If you don’t reach your goal the first time, you will be haunted by the nagging feeling that you must return to complete your unfinished business. Every highpointer has a list of peaks they didn’t summit the first time around. Even Jack Longacre, founder of the Highpointer’s Club, had to take a second attempt to summit Montana’s high point, Granite Peak.
My own list of “second attempt”peaks includes Mt. Rainier, WA (thanks to an atmospheric river the first time around) and Borah Peak, ID (due to some ice on Chicken Out Ridge). And then there’s, the little known Trask Mountain…
My first visit to Trask Mountain was in early August 2025. I decided on a whim to drive up to Yamhill, Oregon, to see if I could bag this relatively easy “drive up” CoHP in the Oregon Coast Range.
This peak sits in logging country, and I’d been smart enough to save this trip for a weekend to avoid any encounters with logging trucks bearing down on me as I drove up Trask Toll Road.
Unfortunately, I didn’t do enough preparation before launching this trip. As I approached the entrance to Trask Toll Road, I saw a sign that read “gate locked ahead.” I disregarded it in hopes it was wrong.
But it wasn’t.
About a half-mile up Trask Toll Road, I came face-to-face with a white metal gate spanning the entire roadway. I stopped to inspect the gate (hoping it was just closed, not locked), but I soon discovered the uncomfortable truth. There was zero chance I was driving up Trask Toll Road on this visit. And since I wasn’t prepared to bike or walk the 22 miles (round-trip) to the summit, I moved on to Plan B.
In an effort to salvage the visit, I drove a ridiculous path through the surrounding gravel roads to get down toward Haskins Creek Reservoir. I’d read a trip report once about an alternate route up Trask Mountain called the “summer route.” This secondary approach allowed visitors to drive up the network of roads south of Trask Mountain. And how hard could that be?
Suffice it to say, I didn’t get up to the summit from the south. I hadn’t adequately researched or downloaded the alternate route before leaving home. So I ended up on the incorrect logging road, where another smaller, but equally impassible gate foiled me for a second time. It was time to head home and regroup. I’d have to save this peak for the fall.
When hunting season rolled around, I decided to make a second attempt at Trask Mountain. On the first weekend in November 2025, I was retracing my route to Yamhill. It was time to confirm if Weyerhaeuser was unlocking the gate on Trask Toll Road for hunters, or whether that was just a relic of the past that other highpointers had been lucky enough to use.
I plugged Camp Yamhill into my navigation system and pointed my RAV4 toward Old Railroad Grade Road, which was a bit muddy from the heavy rains that had come through the prior day.
When I reached Camp Yamhill, I could hear lots of barking in the distance. This seemed odd until I read the signs indicating that K9 Nosework Trials were taking place at the camp this weekend. Nosework is a scent training sport for dogs that teaches them to target and detect specific odors. The sport has been around since 2006, and while it would have been an interesting detour to stop and observe, I had bigger goals in mind and kept driving.
Once I turned onto Trask Toll Road, my stomach sank a bit. The brightly colored sign that said “gate closed ahead” was still posted. Was this a second wasted trip?
I kept driving up the road, with my fingers crossed that the closure sign was just a long-term notice that nobody bothered to take down. It was November 2nd, and hunting season was in full swing. Maybe the Weyerhaeuser folks didn’t feel the need to remove those signs, since they only unlocked the gate a few weekends a year.
As I rounded the bend, my heart began to beat with excitement. I scanned the road ahead and saw the gate was unlocked and wide open. Heck yes! I was going to get the chance to drive up Trask Mountain!!!
A hand-lettered sign was nailed to a tree just beyond the entrance, and it read: OPEN FOR HUNTING SEASON. Yessssss! It wasn’t just a rumor on the internet that Weyerhaeuser unlocked the gate to vehicle traffic. I was going to get my chance.
The 11-mile drive up Trask Toll Road was pretty uneventful. The road surface was in great condition, even after the recent heavy rains, and I even passed two cyclists riding up the road on a Sunday morning ride.
Weyerhaeuser posted yellow mile markers every half mile along the Trask Toll Road, and the route was easy to follow. I just needed to stay on the widest, most direct road heading uphill whenever I came to a dirt road that split off toward the forest.
Following the most developed road worked for me fine until somewhere between miles 7 and 7-1/2, when I came to a junction with a road that seemed even wider than Trask Toll Road. I was glad I’d had the foresight to mark my route on my GPS app. I didn’t want to end up driving around aimlessly on this network of logging roads in the middle of Yamhill County and miss my chance to head up Trask a second time!
As I neared mile 11, I could finally tell which of the summits around me was Trask Mountain. It looked like a dense forest of trees covered the rounded top, which is why I’d have to stop and hike the final half mile.
After cresting a small hill, I reached a broad flat area with ample room for the logging trucks to turn around. It was the size of several football fields, and I was the only one up there. I’d passed several parked trucks on my route up, but they were most likely hunters, not highpointers.
Trask Mountain’s summit was clearly visible now, and the logging road seemed to wind its way uphill toward it. But I knew better. The logging road would only take me halfway there before turning south and away from the summit. I’d need to take a short trek into the woods, just as I had for several other CoHPs in the Coast Range (Rogers Peak and Long Mountain).
As I set out on foot up the road, the sun emerged from behind the clouds and shone warmly on the pine trees lining my route. Raindrops clung to the pine boughs, and the droplets seemed to sparkle in the sunshine like diamonds adorning the trees.
After 0.25 miles of easy hiking on the logging road, the road leveled out here and began to turn away from Trask Mountain. This was as close as the road would get me to my goal. I’d need to find somewhere easy to pick my way uphill, because there was no clear path. The rest of my short journey would be cross-country.
The final 0.25 miles to the summit can be divided into three distinct categories. The first one-third was spent hiking uphill amid the trunks of harvested trees. The undergrowth was soggy and wet, and there were lots of new blackberry vines that formed nature’s “trip wires” around as I headed up toward the forest of trees above me.
The second one-third was a gentle climb through the forest of tall trees I’d seen from my parking spot. The trees were old enough and tall enough that there was plenty of room to walk between their mossy trunks. I didn’t need a trail here, but without any distinguishable landmarks to follow, I felt compelled to keep an eye on my compass to make sure I was still heading east.
My shoes were completely soggy from this short trek, and there were tons of mushrooms the size of saucers amid the moss and fallen branches that littered the forest floor.
On the far end of the forest, I emerged into a broad field covered with rust-orange ferns and more wet undergrowth. This final one-third of the trek took me through wider “fluffy” evergreens that seemed to almost touch each other.
Based on the fresh deer and elk droppings up here, the area was regularly frequented by wildlife. So I searched for the most trampled ground and followed the game trails through the dense trees to avoid the “carwash effect” that comes from rubbing up against too much wet foliage.
And then I was at the bald summit. An open grassy field stretched out for about 50 yards and was completely encircled by trees. It felt like a small UFO landing zone in the middle of nowhere.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t an inspiring summit. All the trees blocked my view in every direction that I turned. So, I turned my eyes to a more granular level, inspecting the ground for anything interesting.
I discovered a few moss-covered concrete footings left behind from the fire lookout tower that once stood atop this summit. And there was a flat line of bricks neatly concreted next to each other, which were presumably from the caretaker’s cabin, too. But that’s about all. No summit register or anything else to make my visit to the top of Yamhill County, Oregon.
Although this wasn’t the most thrilling of my Oregon summits, it did mark a minor milestone. Trask Mountain was my 27th of the 36 county high points. That means I’m officially 75% of the way to completing this quest to visit the highest natural point in every county of my home state.
After a few quick photos, I began heading back the way I came. During my short descent, I got a bird’s eye view of the large logging truck turnaround area where I’d parked. My car was still there. And I was still the only person up here.
I also passed over an overgrown track that might have been the access road up Trask Mountain back during the old fire tower days (pre-1996), but I chose to stick to the most direct route back down rather than explore it.
All told, it took me longer to drive the 11 miles from the gate to the parking area than it did to hike to the modest summit. My GPS watch recorded the journey on foot as 0.97 miles – but that also included my circuit around the top looking for the possibility of a summit log or survey marker.
If it hadn’t been for the locked gate that necessitated two drives out to Yamhill County, this might have been one of the easiest county high points in Oregon.
BONUS MATERIAL
Alternate Routes
- Southern Route. Highpointers who encounter a locked gate on Trask Toll Road can attempt a secondary approach from the south created by Daniel Mick. This is often referred to as the “summer route” because the paved road leading to Dovre Campground is not maintained and may be inaccessible during inclement weather. Details of this alternate route can be found in Daniel’s trip report found HERE.
- Northern Route. Daniel Mick also mapped a potential route from the northwest via Trask River County Campground. Two highpointers confirmed the route’s year-round accessibility in March 2024.
Public Camping Nearby:
- Champoeg State Park Campground is located approximately 18 miles east of Yamhill. This large developed campground is open year-round and offers 21 full-hookup campsites, 54 campsites with water, 6 tent sites with parking nearby, 6 cabins, 6 seasonal yurts, a hiker-biker camping area, bathrooms with flush toilets and showers, picnic tables, fire rings, a disc golf course, fishing, trails, and a visitor center with historical exhibits. Reservations are available online. Cost: $22 for tent sites, $33-35 for RV sites, $54 for cabins, $64 for yurts.
- Dovre Campground is located near the start of the “southern alternate” route, approximately 6 miles west of McGuire Reservoir. This small BLM-managed seasonal campground offers 10 campsites with picnic tables and fire rings, vault toilets, drinking water, and river access. This campground is open from May to September, and reservations are available online or on a first-come, first-served basis. Cost: $15 per campsite.
- Trask River County Campground is located near the start of the “northern alternate” route, and approximately 15 miles east of the city of Tillamook. The campground is open year-round, and offers 102 camp sites (suitable for tents and some smaller RVs), vault toilets, water, and river access. Reservations are available online or by calling (503) 322-3522. Cost: Ranges from $38 to $43 per campsite.
Resources:
- Highpointing Trask Mountain (Peakbagger)
- Trask Mountain (Summit Post)
- Trask Mountain Fire Lookout Photos (FireLookouts.com)’
- Yamhill County, Oregon (official site)
