My first 2018 activation and blessed with such nice WX. Todays activation felt almost like springtime. One chaser told me the bees are already active in his garden.
Let’s see what the rest of winter will bring to OE. Still a mix of snow and dirt trails to the summit at 1418m.
A lot of other curious hikers asking what I’m doing
Btw. gave 2m SSB a try with mixed results. Will try again in the future.
I think I had a bad timing for 20 m SSB with just Spain (@EA2DT) and Sweden (@SA4BLM) in the log . HF conditions were not that great on 20m I guess. But luckily the nice WX motivated a lot of OE and DL activators so S2S on 2m FM and 20m groundwave was a joy
Hello and Happy New Year, Joe.
Thanks for the activation report and the video.
You had a nice WX but everything was covered with snow, so it’s clear that the WX was not so nice a few hours or days ago.
That’s the weather we’ve got here in the North of Spain today. Snowing with more or less intensity pretty much all day long.
Picture taken and sent by some relatives today on their way from San Sebastian to Pamplona
Picture taken by me from the window of my sister apartment, where we had a family gathering,
I’d like to go out and activate tomorrow, but the forecast is rain…
Indeed a strange situation. One might think Spain would have mild tempertures and Austria a lot of snow. Thanks for sharing the pictures.
We had such wx in November but since Christmas is is quite mild with the so call Fön wind. A warm wind north of the alps that likes to eat all the snow
Tomorrow I will need to do some work at home. Maybe I manage to continue building my mcHF 0.6 kit.
Good luck with the weather so that you can do a winter actication too.
Hi Joe,
I had again, a new Sunday morning full of errands. However, I optimisticly thought I would be able to squeeze an activation and I alerted for the activation of a 4 points drive on summit at about 11h30 utc.
I was a bit late but finally on my way to Mt. Erreniega for collecting my first 4 activator points + 3 seasonal bonus points of this year,
When I arrived to the point where the mountain road to the summit starts, I found that the machines had not worked there yet and an important amount of snow was still on.
Totally impossible for my AWD SSangyong Rodius with just regular tyres and I had no time to park the park and do the hyke from that point.
So I, unfortunately had to cancel my alert and postpone my first 2018 activation
Before leaving the mountain base, I parked the car at the side of the road and had a brief walk on the snow in order to test my new boots. There were about 25 to 30 cm of snow there, so I suposse there must be over 30-40 cm of snow in the summit.
It was a pretty short walk, but the new boots got perfectlyclean after the last muddy activation of 2017 and they worked well, without any water or humidity ingress.
Successfully testing good hiking boots is also a win. Better than finding out during a big tour.
Mt. Erreniega is 1037m high so that’s more snow then we have right now.
I’m sure you will get a chance for your first 2018 activation soon.
Will keep an eye on Sotawatch for a potential S2S.
