The parents of one of my 4 years old son college mates invited us and other kids with their parents to lunch and birthday party of their son in the small village of Salinas de Oro where they are originally from and they own a nice weekends and holidays house. The village is in a very nice mountaneous area and as soon as I got informed of such invitation, being this on a Sunday, the day I usually have for SOTA activations, I started looking for any suitable Summit nearby.
I quickly found it. It was a 2 pointer called Izmendia and I prepared for the activation.
It took us some time to get up, have breakfast, get dressed, prepared in the car and drive the 30Km of very curvy mountain road from our QTH to Salinas de Oro, so we got there a bit later than I had liked.
Thus, I started the hike at 11h45 (utc) which was too late, so I was pretty sure I was going to have very Little time for the activation if I wanted to be back in time for the typically late Spanish Sunday lunch, forecasted by about 14h (utc).
This is the look of Mount Izmendia when I started approaching its base.
Quickly I found the path in the middle of a pretty dense forest:
My dog Lucho was leading the ascent with determination:
I followed the path while looking at the track on my GPS screen from time to time:
At this point where the small trees and bushes turned into a nice beech forest, the path turned about 90 degrees to the right:
We soon reached the ridge, which we followed up until we shortly got to the Summit at 12h35 (utc).
I immediately proceeded to set up the GP antenna right on top of the cairn I found there and the gear a few meters away.
The activation went very well.
Started resending a new alert with an updated start time, as the previous one had become obsolete by about one hour.
Before starting on HF I made 2 or 3 CQ calls on 2m FM, which produced zero calls.
Then I called CQ on 30m CW and immediately got spotted by KU6J. The pile up was absolutely awesome for some time. One day I would like to record it for you to see how huge the signals are and how difficult picking up one full callsing after another is. I’m sure this will be particularly interesting for those of you who are only chasing and never activating. Many times it’s just imposible to pick up a full callsign and I just pick up parts of callsigns, which I repeat back along with the signal report. Fortunately, doing so produces the rest of the pile up QRX and the mentionned station itself coming back to me, thus making possible the QSO completion.
28 QSOs were logged in 21 minutes on 30m CW.
When the pile up dried up, I switched to 20m SSB. Thanks to Antonio (EC2AG) spot, I quickly got many calls which let me log 19 QSOs in 19 minutes, 3 of which were S2S.
When no more calls on 20m SSB, I switched to 12m CW.
This time, I firstly got the familiar call of Manuel (EA2DT) and then I was pleased with a S2S QSO from Andy (MM0FMF/P) and a couple of DX QSO from across the pond: N4EX and VE1WT at 14h01 utc.
Just 4 QSOs on 12m and by that time I realised it was far too late and I was going to get my XYL very ungry at me.
Time flies and I didn’t realise of that while working the pile-ups. I have so much fun when working the pile ups that I feel like taken to another world where time doesn’t care… Must be another SOTA fever effect, 
But time does care, so I just switched to 2m FM, made a few CQ calls, which nobody responded (fortunately ;-)) and I made QRT, packed everything up and started a quick descent.
This is a nice view I enjoyed on my descent:
When I was already down and almost getting to the main dirt road, I found a big group of huge vultures at the small pond you can see at the left hand side of the following picture. By the time I took and switched on my camera, many of them flew off. This is the first picture I took without having had the time to zoom for a closer view:
In this second closer picture, you can see a couple of them flying away.
This third picture shows one of the last vultures flying out and the very last one not far from wáter and still on the ground because he had probably eaten and drank so much that his belly was too heavy for him to start flying.
After a few meters running on ground, he finally took off and flew away.
Finally, let me show you a couple of nice pictures I took on my way back to the Little village of Salinas de Oro.
Once there, we had a very nice time and a great birthday party highly enjoyed mainly by all the 4 year old kids.
All in all, 51 QSOs in the log and a very good time in the mountain and the waves.
Thanks to all chasers for your calls and QSOs, as well as the spotters for your great help.
Best 73 de Guru - EA2IF