No, I was not aware of that and… I thought I had read everything so far. Where is that found mate?
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Rule 3.11.1 Seasonal bonus option.
Mark,
Check the VK4 Association Manual. In Northern VK6 there are Summer bonus points. If there are no summer bonuses in northern VK4 it is because the Association Manager did not think them necessary.
73
Ron
VK3AFW
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I have always placed a high value on being the first activator on a summit, its worth it. When you are long gone from this mortal coil you will still have your name in lights on the SOTA Summits list!
I started activating in 2005, when it was possible in the UK to bag a number of summits and be listed as the first activator, which I did. I value this so much that when GM/SS-289 White Hill, near Lockerbie, my first ever activation, was reassessed and moved location a few hundred metres to a slightly higher point and renamed in Dec 2021, I went out of my way (at considerable expense!) to make sure my listing as the first activator, remained under my callsign.
I place high value of these first activation credits
73 Phil G4OBK
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Olavtoppen 3Y/BV-001 has entered the chat.
20K ish cost, weeks on a boat. 5k ish one way trek across an unmapped (i presume) glacier / ice.
Maybe someone on the 3Y0J expedition feels lucky…
And no winter bonus probably.
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Just read your comments and blog Phil about your first SOTA activation (2005) and how it was done on an un-activated hill nearby.
Well… looking outside my kitchen window, I have the same. 1.5 kms away is a small summit and its never been activated and …it will be my first hill. Its only a 1 pointer, but who cares, its a start. (We all start somewhere) and I’ll be the first. (LOL)
Behind that there are two 4 pointers (I can see them also.) They will be next. All around us are all these summits that have never been touched and it looks like I’ll be the first. Some will be quick and others will be a bit more work to get there. But all in all, it will be fun.
Anyway, thanks for the positive comments Phil. Appreciate it.
Ron… no summer points for FNQ.
Oh well…
Mark
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VK8/AL-148 needs activating, 2 pointer
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Absoloutely no way they will activate 3Y/BV! They should get SOTA points and a gold medal for just getting on Bouvet in their dinghys.
You can check out their location in Marema here. They left the Falklands yesterday: MapShare
There is a very long way to go… zoom the map on that dot to the east and you will see Bouvet come in.
73 Phil G4OBK (Bouvet worked before - 4 times from GM, 3 times from G)
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Hi Mark,
It’s really good to see someone from FNQ taking an interest in SOTA. I’ve activated a few summits in southern vk4 but I can see the northern summits will be quite a different proposition than anything down south.
The summer bonus points are contentious. My view of the summer bonus in vk6 was that if someone was encouraged to go out in the summer heat and climb a hill just to get 3 extra points, it was potentially a life threatening situation and no activity program should encourage dangerous activities. But we can all have different views.
If you want to make a case for your local summits to have a summer bonus, you need to raise it with the association manager for vk4, who is Grant VK4JAZ. His contact details are in the Association Reference Manual and possibly also on the summit listing pages at summits.sota.org.uk. Your suggestions will probably be well received once you have activated a few summits and have good first hand experience of it.
The original mapping of vk4 summits was done 10 years ago by another person. Grant has taken over the role a few years ago.
Enjoy the 1 pointers, they are worth doing. Activating them will probably help you evolve your equipment somewhat and possibly re-evaluate your fitness. My faq at vkfaq.ampr.org has a page about SOTA and another about the WWFF program, which gets people operating in parks. The skillsets for sota and parks have many things in common. And many summits are in parks, so the chasers will ask you for a park code. It’s worth being aware of the parks awards. Even if all you do is know it is there, and give people the park code (easy to find out) it will be appreciated by many chasers.
Sometimes there are no SOTA chasers around, or not enough, but there ARE parks chasers, so you use those parks contacts to get your 4 for SOTA. See how the two awards complement each other.
73 Andrew VK1DA/VK2DA
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Imho, it is important to acknowledge that the points awarded in SOTA are not a context-indep endent, objective metric, but rather an orientation as for the summit‘s boldness in the regional context. Points in SOTA are for yourself, like toy money or fake diamonds, and most of all, they cannot be compared easily across two activators with differing preferences and styles.
For instance, most ‚lower region‘ 10-pointers are easy walks or even drive-bys, while the alpine 10-pointers can be anything from a cable-car restaurant to an expedition-style adventure that only a young Reinhold Messner would consider in winter.
The Westliche Zinne I/AA-057 is 10 points, as is the Feldberg DM/BW-001. The former is a >500m climb in brittle Dolomite rock, the latter a beautiful parking lot.
This is not unfairness, it is context-dependence. The amount of points only matter for your own journey, your very personal meandering path to Mountain Goat status or any other personal goal.
Look, I am just 12 points short of MG status. Any night on my way from the office, I could easily bag a 10+3 pointer or many other combinations of two summits. Will I do this? No, after this wonderful 6-year journey with memories for a lifetime, I will not spoil it all by greedily bagging a motorway-on-the-air summit but instead wait for an opportunity that preserves the beauty of this all, of my personal journey between applied physics and immersing myself in bold nature. That it is very personal is important to stress, because I can very well understand, and have great respect for, the many other styles and ways of SOTA.
73 de Martin, DK3IT
PS: For further illustration, check e.g.
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Hey, Armin - I’m still around and am the first activator of a DM summit!
Actually, the tale about this one is that very, very occasionally new summits are added to an association. It is announced on this reflector when the summit will join the scheme and if you are lucky, there is a chance to get there before anyone else!
So even in long-existing associations, there can be summits that are not yet activated (and if they are new ones they can even be reachable without you having to be a competition-level rock climber).
73 Ed.
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Summer bonus points for VK5 would be crazy with our temperatures. The main other problem would be land access during our fire ban season which is from November until March most years and is often adjusted to suit the seasons every year. No way would I put the land owners under any extra pressure for access to their properties during the fire ban season its just another reason they may say no way. Then there is your own personal well being to consider re hiking in 40c temps and related considerations. Remote summits are just part of it as that is where they are, this may be why the summits you speak of have not been activated before in vk4. It’s to hard or costly to even travel out to these areas once every year to get on the list as an activator. Plus in reality the age demographic of SOTA activator is quite old really, I did a talk on SOTA at a local radio club a while ago and most of its members were all older than me and probably huffed and puffed walking back to their cars to drive home that night. We are not young fit athletes we are old fellas trying to keep fit and enjoy the activity and if we have a couple drive up summits that’s my bonus. I did warn before that the radio part of SOTA is the easy bit the logistics of getting to some summits is the hard bit that makes the achievement worth while. If you check my score I have never done a 10 pointer because they are too hard and remote for me to access so I got there by doing more low score summits to make Old Goat. 1567 points so far for 410 summits over 10 years no winter bonus. Rehashing rules is not going to happen to make it any easier you just need to commit and get on with it while you can.
Regards from a 70 year old MG.
Ian vk5cz .
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It was climbed in 2012 (the only time I guess), and based on the video it certainly doesn’t qualify a an easy summit! I am not sure I will see an SOTA expedition to Olavtoppen in my lifetime but you never know, some activators are quite dedicated!
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Now then Mark…
Luxury!!!
I’lll just speak for the UK.
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Our SOTA hills & mountains don’t normally have roads to the summits.
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Our hills and mountains rarely, if ever reach your “mild” winter temperatures - even in our summers.
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You need more than a jumper on some of our summer days. It can cold, wet and windy.
4, In winter (and sometimes in summer), you might be unable to operate as you are in the middle of near hurricane force winds, driving rain, wind. I’ve often turned back, especially in Scotland where sometimes the winter WX is often equivilant to arctic wx conditions. It might also surprise you that walking up a mountain in winter of deep soft snow in bad weather will also mean that not only is the sweat pouring out of every orifice in your body, but the snow or rain is also getting inside your clothing and your orifices. Believe me it would be a luxury to be wrapped in a hot wet steamy blanket. Here it can be like being wrapped in a freezing wet blanket. 
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In winter and in the remoter Scottish hills there are no trails. Not even in the snow. Many places I’ve been climbing in other places in Europe don’t have trails.
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As for insects!! Scottish midges swarm in their millions in warm months and drive both deer and humans to distraction.
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You might also find yourself having to walk a few miles over wet boggy ground. Even to get to a 1 pointer.
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People die on our mountains every winter.
From avalanches, falls on steep snow, exposure from being either ill equiped or simply becoming lost. In a winter storm it is often impossible to see more than a foot or two in front of you. Winter daylight is only a little more than 6 or 7 hours.
By the way, I can’t say I’ve ever seen a snowmobile on the Scottish hills. 
Good luck. Perhaps we could have a handicap system.
Dave
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Firstly, it’s important to note that VK4 is one of the more incomplete VK associations due to mapping issues in the early stages, and the sheer size of the place versus effort to survey the summits. You can see this in some of the names of summits, which really need to be adjusted to match the standard we use.
We have gone back with better mapping on QTopo and added summits in the SE up to about Gympie, and I was going to focus next up to around the Rockhampton area, but I guess we can focus on areas between Cairns and Townsville instead. I can already see at least one summit that would qualify that isn’t listed.
Based on your location on the ACMA database, there’s a couple of summits that are “nearby” (<= 2hrs drive) that could be classed as drive up or almost drive up. The highest is probably VK4/NH-008, Mount Spec, which needs both a name update and a height update, and this is 8 points. It looks like you can drive to Paluma Dam (about 2 hrs), and then walk from there on a MTB trail for a bit over a 1km for not quite 100m of altitude gain.
The second is unlisted and that is 30 minutes away, at Mt Cudmore. I can’t tell if the road to the summit is gated or not because there’s no street view coverage, but assuming it is open (or you can find someone with the key), that’d be a drive-up, albeit only 1 point. That’s one to talk with VK4JAZ about listing.
VK4/NH-006 (8 points) looks like it has 4WD tracks to the top, based on QTopo and a quick look on street view, approx 2 hours 5 minutes from your QTH. There may be questions about access into the Nature Refuge, but there doesn’t appear to be a gate.
VK4/NH-004 (Mount Halifax) is a 10 pointer with a 3km or so walking track that shouldn’t require a machete and a pith helmet to conquer. 1hr 30 from your QTH.
The myth of the drive-up 10 pointer prevails. There are close to 200,000 summits in the program, of which less than 10% are 10 pointers, and probably no more than 2-3% of those 10 pointers are able to be driven right to the top. If you are going to complain about anywhere though, look a bit closer to home, as VK3 probably does better percentage wise than Europe because of the tendency of the state to conflagrate yearly and the need to have well maintained firetrails through a lot of the alpine country. Still need a 4WD and/or a walk for most of them though.
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Maybe an ‘honour roll’ of first activations per user to join the other such ‘honour rolls’ on sotadata would resolve this recurring question?
I know for well-established regions this would be a very static list, but it would give those in new regions another field to test themselves in.
That said, I’m an interested party as (if my SQL is correct) the ZL list looks something like:
| Callsign | First Activations |
|---|---|
| ZL4NVW | 148 |
| ZL2AJ | 105 |
| ZL4RA | 48 |
| ZL2ATH | 34 |
| ZL3AB | 27 |
| ZL3CC | 20 |
| ZL3GA | 17 |
| ZL3MR | 15 |
| ZL2JML | 14 |
| ZL1SKL | 13 |
| ZL1BYZ | 12 |
| ZL4DVG | 11 |
| ZL3DRN | 10 |
| ZL2STR | 6 |
| ZL2UCX | 4 |
| ZL3GIG | 4 |
| VK3ARR | 4 |
| ZL1CNB | 4 |
| ZL4FZ | 3 |
| HB9DQM | 3 |
| ZL4TZ | 3 |
| ZL2KGF | 3 |
| ZL2RMC | 3 |
| ZL2SAR | 3 |
| … | … |
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You are probably correct there Romain.
The 3Y0I Polish led DXpedition to Bouvet had two members who were considering activating the summit, if they had time, as they would have access from their chosen campsite on the glacier.
Unfortunately, 3Y0I was one of the two (the other 3Y0Z) who got close to the island in recent years but had to give up due to major damage problems on their ships.
Let’s hope the current 3Y0J Norwegian/US team have more success (but they are not planning to activate Olavtoppen).
POTA has allocated a number of LA-2524 for the Island and it has been in IOTA for a long time as AN-002.
To track the progress of the yacht this team are using - go to 3Y0J Bouvet 2023 (garmin.com)
They are making good process between the Falklands and South Georgia at the time of writing this.
73 Ed.
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And why should this summit only get 10 points?
As a largely ‘ex’ mountaineer/climber with many ‘un-notable’ ascents to my credit it has so far as I’m aware, escaped the ability of the mountaineering community to come up with grading system for the difficulty of reaching the summits of different hills and mountains. - with the notable exception of those summits which require a degree of rock or ice climbing ability, and/or approaches requiring difficult approaches across glaciers.
To ‘grade’ every SOTA summit, would in my opinion be impossible for the very reason Mark/VK4MFX gave in his post. There are so many variables to take into account it would take an enormous amount of time and effort to achieve any agreement.
At the end of the day SOTA is meant to be a an enjoyable hobby and an interesting personal challenge.
Dave
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Very true! I spent some time working on this problem and narrowed it down to five parameters, but could not get past the fact that at least three of them were a matter of opinion rather than measurement.
Considerable thought and debate went into the start of SOTA. By accepting a degree of “fuzziness” in the rules a program was devised that has proved quite applicable world-wide although there were some tweaks to the rules later, such as the addition of the summer bonus. Yes, it was devised in the UK by people accustomed to UK conditions, but this was a strength rather than a weakness because of the wide variety of landforms and weather conditions found in the UK. For instance the old weather observatory recorded 261 days of full gale force winds per year on the summit of Ben Nevis, and it is a little known fact that the UK has more tornadoes per given area than any other country in the world, including the USA!
Many outdoor activities court danger. Dealing with that danger is part of the fun! See the GR part 3.7.4 “Activators must be competant to undertake their proposed Expedition and must carry suitable equipment, taking account of the terrain, weather conditions etc.” It all comes down to personal responsibility, assessing risks for yourself, taking advice.
Bonus points for regions of Associations are allocated at the outset after consultation between the AM’s team and the MT, they are tailored to the needs of the Association but they are not set in stone and if experience in any region shows that a change should be made, it will be made.
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SOTA is well protected from being considered legally liable. But the activator could still be seriously injured or worse, chasing 3 extra points.
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