My year has been OK. I did less activations than in previous years.
My son has taken up fell running and 2025 was his first full season, we’ve been to some pretty wonderful places around the Yorkshire Dales and English Lake District. The weather has mostly been very agreeable too. A few would be SOTA days have been taken up by fell races.
Highlight of the SOTA year has got to be the GW SOTA S2S Hog Roast event. It was very much a last minute thing for me, Ben extended an invite and I took up his offer. Despite the rain it was a very enjoyable event and I didn’t even mind the rally cars going past my tent in the (very) early hours of the morning!
GW SOTA event warm up, activation on the day before.
Setting up the GW SOTA event site the evening before.
I learnt of John G4YSS’ injury on Kinder Kinder Scout earlier this year, and read his (non) activation report detailing the experience of having to get help from Mountain Rescue. G4YSS:G/SP-001 Kinder - My Achilles Heel
I’ve thought for a while that I’d like to help Mountain Rescue in some way, but hadn’t really worked out how that would be. At one of my son’s fell race events we got talking to some Mountain Rescue volunteers and got invited to the Mountain Rescue depot in Clapham, near Ingleton for a look around.
Some weeks later, I went to the Mountain Rescue depot with my son and we were given a wonderful private tour of the depot and were shown the equipment and vehicles. It just so happened that a Mountain Rescue dog handler walked through the depot at that time with his beautiful Collie search dog. We got chatting and I ended up signing up to be a ‘dogsbody’. A dogsbody is a person who hides as a training subject for the search dogs to find, either as ongoing training for qualified dogs, or to train up dogs going through their assessments.
I enjoy volunteering as a dogsbody, the dogs are simply amazing, they are very highly trained and only the best dogs are accepted to start training. I’ve said it before, but I think of my volunteering as a way of saying thanks for Mountain Rescue looking after our John G4YSS so well.
A number of would be SOTA days have been spent hiding in the Yorkshire Dales, getting sniffed out by highly trained noses! Last night I took part in my first night search training, it was a totally different experience, but quite exciting. The dogs’ noses seem to work the same in the darkness! A great end to the year. 
Best wishes for 2026.
Colin