March 13th 2025, a milestone day for me and the end of the journey to the first mountain goat, with the added bonus of two points spare.
It was the intention to activate St Sunday crag and Helvellyn on the 12th of March completing the quest. However, the lake district weather had other ideas with very strong winds and snow making only St Sunday crag possible. Mobile signal was none existent on the summit, so it was call and pray. There were very few people on VHF necessitating braking into an existing QSO for a couple of signal reports. Cold and a bit dejected, a slow trudge into the wind and snow back to the car completed the day. To add insult to injury, the shop in Glenridding had also run out of pork and apple pies. It was agreed that one would put by the following day for me to return to.
13th March 2025
What a different day, snow of the fells, sunshine and only a light breeze, much better. The route up to Helvellyn was coppermines, whiteside, and on to the summit. The walk in was completed in ankle deep snow opening up to a light breeze and sunshine, perfect conditions. Mobile signal was again sketchy so with a bit of trepidation a blind call on 145.500 resulted in a wall of sound coming back to me. QSY and a rapid set of contacts including many regular chasers passing greetings and congratulation messages, and that was that, Mountain Goat achieved, what a feeling!
After taking a lot of photos and chatting to a handful of people, the walk out was just as nice, especially with the new found spring in my step. Final win was a pork and apple pie waiting for me in Genridding on return to the village. The pie was heated to within a couple of degrees of that of an active volcano/McDonalds apple pie, and devoured as soon as the critical temperature/ risk of plastic surgery had subsided.
I have been activating since 2008, always with the end target of achieving the elusive mountain goat accolade. Work, family and the usual day to day problems have made this more of an obsession than it probably should have been. The journey has taken me via work postings to some interesting locations, with activations on HF, VHF, UHF, Phone, CW, SSTV and other digital modes. In short, a huge amount of fun in planning, mapping and keeping fitness levels to a reasonable standard.
SOTA has been a very big part of my life with most of my hillwalking biased towards collecting points. It feels very strange to be sitting here now having reached the target, can I now just wake up and go for a none points scoring walk? Is there hill life outside of Sota goat?
I would like to convey a huge amount of gratitude to the many chasers who have patiently waited for my frozen fingers to log their calls, put up with wind blast responses, and constant standbys to overcome “PTT finger” (the art of warming ones digit enough to continue to key the radio). There are many more chasers than back in the dark ages when I started this epic journey, the 20m pile-ups on a weekend rival any dxpedition and are a real pleasure to work through with the low power levels we usually activate with.
So what next?
With two points spare from Goat 1, it would be rude not to top up the remaining 998 points to goat 2.
My personal nemesis is CW, it is probably time to overcome the stage fright and just get on with it, hopefully adding a new dimension to activating.
Finish the multiband QRP labs radio and activate with it.
Fill the gaps in some of the regions unique.
Thanks again to all the chasers, MT for putting this program together, my fellow activators for all the S2S, and for all the advice and laughs along the way.
73
Tim
G4YTD
