N1CLC: 2020-03-22 Thomas Mountain

I’ve been wanting to get up to Thomas Mtn. for a while now so today’s the day. I loaded up and headed out at about 0730 local. It’s about 1.5 hours to the road up to the summit. Thomas Mountain is located north east of Anza in the San Bernardino National Forest. The summit is at 6,824 feet. It rained in San Diego quite a bit last week so I expected some residual snow. What I got was a little more than residual. It was 4 to 6 inches in places, and the road was pretty slick. I have all-wheel-drive but it’s not like a full locked 4WD. In addition, I’ve got highway tires on my rig so I had to be careful not to get too risky.

The road up is in pretty good shape. My AWD Highlander made it to within .6 miles of the summit. I stopped short when the road became too sketchy for me to risk. Escentally, it was still frozen over when I got there and it looked like someone had slid into the side and possibly got stuck in the mud. If I did the same, I would have been stuck, and high centered.

I was happy to get out and hike the rest of the way. I actually looked forward to the walk in the snow. It was very peaceful. The local wildlife was almost loud, and I could hear big clumps of snow falling off the trees hitting ground with a wump.

I took a chair with me but to my surprise, I didn’t need it, there were pic-nic tables at the top. The one that I used for my operating position also had a back rest!!! After clearing some snow off the table and bench, I used the pad from the chair to sit on so I wouldn’t get too wet. The absolute best part of this setup was the view. With my back to a rock, I had a fantastic view!

Setup took me about 5 minutes. I used my LNR end-fed antenna because I wanted to make sure I could sit at the pic-nic table. After spotting myself I had the usual pileup of operators calling. I did a little chasing of other operators on summits and a couple of them called me. I’m still trying to improve my CW copy speed and seem to be getting better on the keyer. I was able to muddle through 24 contacts while I was up there. I did try single-sideband but I didn’t spot and I couldn’t reach some of the other operators calling CQ during some contest.

The drive down at the top was exciting at times. As the day warmed up, it was a slippery sloppy mess. I stopped at the store on the way home and drove the car through the dirt dragon to get the top layer of mud off of it. All in all, it was an epic day.

I thought I was finally going to get my winter bonus points this trip. Alas... nope. That ended on the 15th. Oh well, next year.

Contacts

Date:22/03/2020 | W6/CT-016 (Thomas Mtn.) | Points: 6 | Bonus: 0 |

Time	Callsign	Band	Mode
18:01	K0LAF	14MHz	CW
18:13	W0MNA	14MHz	CW
18:14	W0ERI	14MHz	CW
18:15	WW7D	14MHz	CW
18:16	N6AN	14MHz	CW
18:18	WU7H	14MHz	CW
18:19	KT5V	14MHz	CW
18:20	W5ODS	14MHz	CW
18:21	K5QR	14MHz	CW
18:22	NG6R	14MHz	CW
18:23	KT5X	14MHz	CW
18:24	WN4AT	14MHz	CW
18:25	KX0R	14MHz	CW
18:28	N6AN	14MHz	CW
18:35	W7RV	7MHz	CW
18:42	K6HPX	7MHz	CW
18:43	N6AN	7MHz	CW
18:44	K6YK	7MHz	CW
18:46	K6QCB	7MHz	CW
18:48	AB6SO	7MHz	CW
18:50	NG6R	7MHz	CW
18:51	W0NF	7MHz	CW
18:54	KV0I	7MHz	CW
19:27	N6OUI	14MHz	CW