2017-12-24 Iron Mountain

Today’s hike was to W6/SC-214 - Iron Mountain to check it off my SOTA list.  This is a low difficulty but hiking poles would have been handy.  It’s dry desert landscape  and a pretty good climb up.  A lot of rocky areas that you need to push up on but nothing really that difficult.  It’s also a long one at 5.6 miles round trip. One thing to note were the number of people that were interested in what I was doing.  I explained it was geeky and they didn’t think so, they thought it was cool.

There weren’t many people up on top so I setup the dipole and worked a a guy in Maryland, New Mexico, and Victoria BC.  The descent was quick and easy and once the dog could smell or see the parking area in the distance she really picked up the pace.  I thought I ran out of water so I was very interested to get off the mountain and to the nearest store to get some fluids. 

Right after this trek, I went and bought some poles.  After Poser Mtn. and this hill, hiking poles will really come in handy.  I didn’t get the required 4 contacts to get my points, but I’ll be back to this as I train up for the Grand Canyon hike.

Contacts

●     N4C

●     AH2AQ

●     VE7ATJ

Loadout:

●     MFJ-1910 Telescoping Mast

●     MFJ 20M Dipole

●     Yaesu FT-891D HF Radio at 100 watts
●     Yaesu FT-70D HT

●      DDT Ops Anti-Venom field pack with food

●     3 L of water

●     SOTA Dog

●     iPhone with and MotionX GPS

REFERENCE

●      My Typical SOTA Loadout

●      For more info on SOTA, rules, etc, go to the homepage HERE.

●      Ham Terminology
●      SOTA Specific Links

73s,

-- Chris Claborne