Mt. Malkasko or Malkaxko is a wide flat Summit 35 Km NorthWest of my QTH, which I had neither activated nor visited before.
I was looking at some satelite images and the hike seemed to be pretty easy.
After parking at the small village of Lezaun at about 8h utc, I took this clear path.
The Summit of Mt. Malkasko can be reached either following this path or taking the one to the left seen in this following picture. I took the left because this one takes you much higher than the other, which follows a Little river upstream along the bottom of a valley. Of course, the one I took to the left gets steep immediately.
But not too much and it gently takes you higher and higher.
On our way, my dog Lucho met some friends.
This is a backwards view during our ascent.
Another friend’s of Lucho…
At this point the path was pretty much horizontal. Very easy to walk.
We even had to descend a little to ascend a bit afterwards.
Look at the beautiful Mt. San Donato, which I’d like to actĂvate one of these days, before the WX gets too bad.
I wasn’t sure but according to the info I had seen on the internet and my GPS map, the Summit should be straight ahead in this picture:
We had to cross the gate of the Stony Wall ahead and the Summit was pretty close further ahead:
After a very little more than an hour hike, we got to the Summit:
Just a small cairn and a mountaneers mailbox indicated the Summit in this open wide and pretty much flat area.
I quickly set up the station and started the activation a bit earlier than my Sotawatch alert announced.
The activation was a lot of fun. I started on 20m CW and had a great run with a big pile-up which let me log 45 QSOs in 30 minutes, including a S2S with HB.
Then I changed to 30m and only 9 QSOs were logged before the calls dried.
At this point I QSYed to 20m SSB but, as soon as I tuned around 14.275, I realised that the CQ WW DX SSB contest was taking place, so I immediately escaped to 12m CW, where I managed to log 6 more QSOs.
It was 10h utc and with no more takers on 12m, I decided to QSY to 2m FM.
There I logged 8 QSOs, four of which were S2S.
I had not good mobile phone signal and Sotawatch wasn’t available for me in this summit. However, I had my friend Ignacio - EA2BD telling me on the 2m band that an EA2 activator was working on 30m, so I QSYed there and worked EA2CIA/P S2S at EA2/VI-026, plus 4 more QSOs.
Finally, I QSYed back to 2m FM and waited for 2 local colleagues to get to their summits and start their activations, while I was tearing down the HF antenna cables and so on.
The waiting payed off and 2 more S2S QSOs were logged. One with EB2AOC/P at EA2/VI-002 and the other with EB2GKK/P at EA2/NV-131.
After 2 hours and 20 minutes, my batteries were weak but still alive and my log had collected 77 QSOs. Great!
These are a few pictures I took from this wide and flat Summit before leaving:
On our descent, I took a close picture to these nice Pyreneean horses.
In this following picture we see the Summit where the activation took place, right to the left of the white far away building, which is the hermitage of Trinidad de Iturgoyen.
The last picture is of Mt. Mugaga, which accompanied me all the way and although it’s not a SOTA, I activated it last year for the Vértices Geodésicos of Spain award, before I met the SOTA program…
Thank you very much for letting me have a very nice time once again, for your calls, your spots and your nice company.
Best 73 de Guru - EA2IF