2020-01-12 Corte Madera and Los Pinos

Today, I’m shooting for a double summit.  I conducted my annual hike to Corte Madeira and Los Pinos Mountain.  This was one of the longer ones with a total of 11.3 miles and an elevation gain of about 2,362 feet.  To do this one, I park about a mile and a half from a valley between the two mountains, go up one, and then come down and up the other.

I was wheels up at about 0730 this morning with a banana nut muffin and a double shot late.  It was a beautiful clear day with no wind.  The temperature at the trailhead was about 40F, perfect for a hike.  The first 1.5 miles has an elevation gain of about 500 feet.  By that time it had warmed up enough for me to remove my fleece and launch the final two miles to the Corte Madera summit.  

2020-01-05 Eagle Peak

I met up with Jacob, W6RWS, and headed out to Eagle Peak this morning. I’ve done this one a few times and given the beautiful day I was looking forward to it.  It was in the low 70s and we had a lot of fun.  Neither one of us were in a hurry so it was nice to kick back on the summit and play radio. 

Jacob was on the peak and I was offset a bit to keep the interference down.  Jacob started on VHF and I think he was activated before he switched over to HF.  I picked up a familiar call sign, K6MXA, John was not far from us activating W6/SC-260, a no-name peak just south of El Capitan Reservoir.  We were probably 20km apart.  That was fun to finally get a summit-to-summit with John.

2020-01-01 Iron Mtn. First Summit of 2020

Happy New Year!

I’m kicking off the new year with the first summit with the radio.  I made a quick trip up to Iron Mtn., not far from my house.  It was a beautiful day with temps over 70f.

I’ve been to this peak several times and I guess the only memorable thing this trip was my effort to keep my telescoping mast upright. 

I made several phone and CW contacts and had a nice conversation with a gentleman from Lakeside.  If you were wondering why I butchered your call-sign, it was a bit hard to hear your signal over his voice :)

SOTA '19 Accomplishments & 2020 Goals

At the beginning of 2019, I layed out some goals for my Summits On The Air (SOTA) activities.  Let’s see how I did on those and discuss what’s to come in 2020.  

(note: click on image for larger)

2019 Goals:

●     I set out to break my 2018 SOTA stats

○     Number of peaks summited in 2018 - 56

○     Eevation gained in 2018 - 57,539

○     SOTA points in 2018 - 303

●     Learn morse code so that I could hike with a lighter rig up to mountain tops and communicate with other SOTA dudes on other peaks that ran morse only.

●     Setup a portable winlink station in a backpack so that I could send email via radio during a disaster at a remote site in support of our ARES primary mission.

●     Setup FT8Call, also known as JS8 Call to experiment with this mode.

OK, let’s see how I did.

2019-12-28 Poser Mtn.

I went up to Poser Mtn. today.  Unlike last time, I expect to get my one whole point (actually it's 2).  You see, I packed up and left the summit with only three contacts the last time.  Although I “activated” the summit, I didn’t get the points because I only had 3 contacts.  For some reason I thought I only needed 3 (instead of 4) and I was in a time crunch.  The last time I was up there, the wind was really blowing and I’m hoping to avoid that today.  One other interesting factoid is that I was on this peak exactly two years to the day!  Creepy!

(click on pictures for larger)

I took my time getting out of the house and left about 9AM.  It’s about a 45 minute drive and I planned a two hour hike.  From the road to the summit is only about 1 mile (see my route here)... but it’s a bushwhack.  It takes time because I want to avoid stepping on living growth wherever possible so it’s slow going.  Also, at times, it can get thick.  So a lot of stop and go, plan, and go around.  On the plus side, the temprature was about 55 F, so it made for pleasant hiking weather.

2019-12-22 San Gabriel & Occidental

This weekend may be the last chance that I can activate up in the San Gabriels in 2019.  A storm is moving in and will most likely dump quite a bit of snow, making the trails on San Gabriel (W6/CT-019) and Occidental (W6/CT-098) too treacherous to pass until it melts next year due to the narrow path on a very steep hillside.  A couple of hams that I’m acquainted with went up there on Friday, so I figured it was still open, meaning no deep snow and ice.  Adam, K6ARK mentioned he was willing to go on Saturday so we decided to link up at my house and depart at about 0530 PST.  Adam was right on time and we quickly launched after loading our packs into my car.

(click on image for larger)  (Updated and replaced pixi radio with Rockmite )

2019-10-15 Combs Peak

With travel and rain, I haven’t been able to get out for a few weeks, but the forecast for this weekend was sunny skies.  Itching to get out, I headed over to Combs Peak, located in the Anza Borego area.  The drive is a bit long, about an hour from my house on the other side of Temecula. 

I had thought about hitting this peak and another one about 3 miles away.  I did that last year and the down side is that I really had to hustle to get it finished by sun down, the second one is a vicious bushwhack and not as much fun..  After watching several episodes of "Sailing Uma", a fantastic yachting VLOG I took Capt. Dan's mantra and made it my own, "I'm not in a hurry to get anywhere".  I decided to scrub the second peak and took Sulu with me since it would be shorter.  When the dog sees me with my hiking boots on, she get excited.  WOW, what a joy it was to not be rushing around.