With the amazing warm sunny days we are having here these last days (terrible if we bear in mind that we are in February, which is winter time in the Northern hemisphere) I decided to go activate Mt. Erreniega, very close to my QTH, for the first time this year in order to get the 4 points plus winter bonus.
It was a real pleasure hiking in the sunshine.
I forgot doing it at home, so I tried to raise an alert with the help of my smartphone, but I couldn’t do it. For some unknown to me reason, when I entered the correct information in the two failed attemps I tried, the system told me that the alert wasn’t raised because the association was not recognised.
Well, I got to the summit a bit later than expected but it wasn’t any problem because there was not an alert.
I installed my 7m pole trapped by the branches of a small pine tree in a way that I didn’t even need any bungee, cord or anything. The endfed antenna wire sloped down towards the NorthEast and the counterpoise wire got extended and tied to the branch of another pine tree in a way that it got almost horizontal and elevated about 1m above the ground.
I selfspotted from my smartphone by SPOTmySOTA app and quickly got the first AND ONLY 2 chasers on 20m CW.
Unbelievingly, I had no more calls after the first two, so I decided to QSY to 30m in order to guarantee the minimum 4 contacts on the log.
The 30m band performed a bit better but anyway, it didn’t seem to be at any optimal propagation conditions. The time of the day was not the best either, as it was almost lunch time for most of the central European countries. In Spain, we usually have lunch at about 14h30 (local), 13h30 (utc) but for most of the European countries, their lunch time is at about noon (local), 11h utc
That’s probably why there were less chasers on frequency at the time of my activation.
Well, this is the not very extense log after nearly 3 quarters of an hour on air:
The DX of the day was WP4I and it was me who called him and got picked up on my first call, despite my 5 watts QRP.
I also had the joy to include these 3 S2S QSOs in the log:
There were some horses around in the place I chose to set up. They initially moved away from me and kept eating grass at a safe distance during the begining of my time there, but they seemed to realise that I was not representing any threat for them, so they started to slowly move and approach my position.
By the time I was doing the last QSO, one of the horses had approached very much and had started to eat grass from right underneath the elevated counterpoise wire. I ended up talking to S53Y while elevating the counterpoise wire even higher with my hand in order to let the horse eat the grass and pass under the wire without breaking it or pulling from it. I fortunately succeeded and the horse kept eating until it finally passed to the other side of the wire without breaking anything.
On my descent, I had a slip on a muddy steep slope. When I was about to land on the mud, I had a reflect, pushed with my walking stick on ground and performed a sort of pirouete with my body in order to avoid landing right on the mud. And I succeeded, I indeed avoided landing on the mud…
but my bottom landed right on a big and pretty fresh cow-shit. Well, I’ll omit any further details, but you can guess what I had to do with my trousers as soon as I got home 
Thanks to the chasers.
Best 73,
Guru