After quite a long time trying to find a day for a new joint activation, Ignacio - EA2BD and I finally found the right one today. It’s a Monday but it’s a holiday so we planned for a joint activation last night. We spoke about different possibilities and we soon agreed on Mt. Lakarri, which had been activated just once on VHF by our friend Santi - EA2BSB.
I’ve got this picture from the web. We didn’t take it today.
The WX forecast predicted rain but we decided to go out though.
We parked the car at the Alto de Errea and took the very muddy track towards Lakarri Summit from the North. As it was predicted, we got rain over the first 30-40 minutes of our ascent.
There was a very muddy but clear and not too steep path, but for some reason we took the difficult way.
We got into impenetrable dense forest, where we got very wet before we finally had to abandon an return unable to penetrate it any further. On our way back, we found a path going up, which we had missed on our right when we had just passed some minutes before. We took and followed this new and even muddier path, which was little by little becoming steeper, thus taking us quickly up closer to the Summit.
I don’t know exactly when but it fortunately stopped raining and after some time progressing well on this new path, we unexplicably left it towards the right to enter again into forest through what it seemed to us like a more or less clear and strighter way to the Summit. This decision put us soon on a very, very steep and a bit dangerously sleepery track, which we managed to cover by just grabbing bushes, tree roots, branches and anything capable to provide some help to keep moving upwards without slipping down the very steep slope. After a really difficult final part, where we even had to crawl for a while, we finally got to what, in the fog, it seemed us to be the Summit, so we took these pictures.
We looked for the trig point and we soon found it and realised that we were not exactly there yet
But we were within the AZ and we decided to set up and try to be on air ASAP, as we were behind Schedule.
We were wet without knowing when the rain would come again, so we agreed on installing just one station. The chosen one was Ignacio’s, as it’s very well preconnected with his home made plug & play rack, making it very fast to be on air in a matter of very few minutes.
We just put a telescopic pole up with and end fed long wire cut for 20m band.
Despite this antenna was for 20m, Ignacio let me start the operation trying on 30m CW, while he worked 2m FM.
The operation on 30m CW with this non resonant antenna produced just 7 QSOs with pretty poor signal reports.
After this, it was Ignacio’s turn on 20m SSB. He got a good pile-up and was so excited working it that he didn’t even sat and worked the whole operation standing, as you can see in the following pictures:
In this photo, Ignacio seems to be thinking… Ufff, one by one, one by one, please! 
While Ignacio was working 20m SSB, I heard him working S2S with Alberto - EA2DCA/P, so I approached and Ignacio kindly passed me the microphone for my only S2S QSO of the day.
Then I worked on installing my 7m long pole in order to have a proper GP for 30m band, but when I had put it on and was about to connect the counterpoise wires, I found that the Faston connector I use for that purpose was missing and I didn’t find it anywhere around, which made me shout out loud some censurable swearwords…
After accepting that a proper operation on 30m CW wouldn’t be possible, I packed my GP antenna stuff and waited while Ignacio worked his 20m SSB pile up and took a couple of pictures of the foggy summits around us.
Once Ignacio was done on SSB, we QSYed to CW and I took my turn, in which I had a good run of 26 stations logged in 19 minutes.
While I was working the pile-up, Ignacio took some more pictures of the foggy landscapes and myself:
As soon as the pile up dried up, since it was cold and foggy and we didn’t know how longer the WX would hold without pouring more rain, we made QRT, packed up and prepared to get to the trig point through the proper path which we had found behind some bushes near our place, the path we should have used instead of the difficult one we took 
.
We quickly got to the trig point and took a few pictures before starting our way back.
By the time we got to the car, it was raining again, so we all got home very wet. But we had a very nice time in the mountain and on air.
Thanks everybody for your calls, spots and company.
The WX was not the best but it was a very nice pleasure SOTAing again with Ignacio and I’ll look forward to doing it again soon.
Best 73 de Guru - EA2IF
