At the start of the year, I bought myself a Garmin watch for maps and tracking my activities. It only seemed appropriate to have a look at this, as all my SOTA activations have been logged with it.
The only slight nuance is that I don’t distinguish between cycling and walking when on a route, I just record the whole thing as one hiking activity, I’m sure I could change or chop it up later but I’m not that fussed.
Stats 
- I did 113 SOTA summits in 84 outings.
- Hiked/biked 1,108 km.
- Furthest being Devil’s Point, Cairn Toul (GM/ES-003), Angel’s Peak and Braeriach (GM/ES-002) at 44¼ km
- Shortest was Craigendarroch (GM/ES-078) at 2.3 km
- An average outing of 13.2 km
- 57.8 km of ascent - a little more than half way to space
- Moving time of 194 hours (just over 8 days)
- 293 hours of total time, including activations and finding more sweets in my bag for Fraser.
- An average summit of 770m, which lines up with my average score of 5.77, given my predominately GM activating.
- Somewhere around 1.2 million steps
- This would account for bike vs. hike but for some reason some activities haven’t stored steps, so I’ve filled in the gaps.
Summits 
I managed to activate all GM/ES summits, and creep into 4th spot on the activator roll for all G in 2025, finishing the year on 901 points. Think I’d set myself the target of 800 by the end of the year and then when that was past in October, 900 was the new goal (including all of GM/ES).
Many memorable summits, but also many that aren’t in the front of my mind, and so writing them up on here or elsewhere helps to remind me of them later on. Every hill has been enjoyable, from little to large, from scorching to sodden.
Software 
I also made a few little toy apps:
- wen goat - how long until your next
- Cairngorm Climbers - who’s climbed what in the Cairngorms National Park
- Completely - See your completes by year and region
- Andre Saunders SOTA Island Award Tracker - see the scoreboard for the GM/SI award (assuming activators upload their logs…
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Radio Stars 
It’s been good to get to know everyone, on the air, on here, and in person. Schedules can be hard to line up, even just myself to get out, so with others it can be even harder. Particularly as I’m a week day activator (only 7% of my activations were on a weekend), but luckily there’s a nearby OAP who can rearrange his coffee mornings.
Here’s looking forward to 2026! 