I recently found myself with a week to spare and my brand new KX2 ready to see its first summit, so I did the only logical thing and planned and executed an entire trip around SOTA. I just got back, and I’m writing up this post to share my planning process in the hopes that I’ll either help or inspire someone else, or someone else with a better process will tell me how I should do it next time! And to record which summits I ended up doing and why, in case anyone else is inspired to visit Flagstaff for SOTA too.
The Planning Phase
My first step was to choose a destination. I’m living in California now, and I didn’t want to spend more than about a day (or a small fortune) travelling on either end, so it needed to either be a reasonable drive or flight from home. And of course I figured I might as well try to grab a bunch of points, because why not? So I loaded up my personal favorite SOTA planning tool, SOTLAS, pointed it at the entire western USA, and added filters for summits worth lots of points (in my case, 8+) and with 25+ activations. (I was thinking that activation count was a good proxy for how accessible the summit is. It’s not perfect, but for a first pass, it does ok.) I expected to see a bunch of dots near Yosemite or Tahoe, which would be a reasonable drive from home, but in fact I didn’t see many there. What I saw instead was Arizona and New Mexico have a bunch. And in particular I noticed Flagstaff AZ has about 2 dozen within an hour drive of downtown. A little logistics research on my favorite non-SOTA-specific planning sites and I lined up a nice cheap AirBnB in Flagstaff, some cheap flights and a cheap 4WD Jeep rental in Phoenix, and I had the skeleton of a trip.
Flagstaff had so many great SOTA mountains to choose from that my next challenge was to figure out which mountains were the best for me to attempt, since I only had 4 days and ~30 candidates to choose from. So, being a huge nerd with a thoroughly-engrained Google habit I made a spreadsheet. I sprinkled in a little magic so that by manually inputting the SOTA Summit ID (e.g. from SOTLAS), the sheet automatically populates its name, GPS location, elevation, SOTA points, etc. Then for each summit I figure out where to park to begin the hike (by reading blog posts, looking at maps and park websites, etc), and manually input the GPS location of my parking spot to the sheet. Then a little more magic automatically populates the driving time from my hotel and hiking time from the parking spot to the summit, provides clickable links to open the driving/walking directions, and makes everything look pretty.
At least, that’s the theory: this works pretty well in my home town near San Francisco, where Google Maps knows about most existing hiking trails, and pretty much every road is paved. But in Flagstaff, Google didn’t know about existing road conditions (and in some cases closures), so its driving estimates were somewhere between optimistic and ridiculous. And its knowledge of hiking trails was basically zero, so most of the hiking estimates are worthless as well. So while this sheet is useful at home, YMMV based on maps data quality at your destination. But even so, I found the sheet useful for organizing my ideas about which mountains to choose based on relative driving time, even if the absolute times were sketchy at best, and as a place to keep notes and such. In case anyone else wants to try out the sheet, feel free to try it out here and make a copy for yourself.
All that planning done, I just had to decide which mountains to do on which days. For that I just kind of stared at the sheet and the map and grouped them according to what felt right. 
Maybe I could write some kind of python script to suggest groups of nearby mountains to do in the same day, but I figured that planning at that level of detail probably wouldn’t hold up on the day anyway, which (spoiler alert) turned out to be right! So just keeping all the summits and parking locations in a big list turned out to be handy on its own. On with the trip!
The Trip
Monday: we spent the day flying to Phoenix, driving to Flagstaff, and grabbing supplies.
Tuesday: finally the fun part! I decided to start out with a bang and do a double-header of W7A/CS-005 and W7A/CS-007 following the advice of NJ7V. White Horse Hills turned out to be a pleasant and short walk and easy activation. This was my first summit with my new KX2. My previous go-to was my QRPLabs QDX, which I had used for 40+ activations on 3 continents. Not only did I immediately pick up a contact from JK, after calling CQ SOTA, I was pleasantly surprised to find I had a small pileup pretty much immediately. While I had used my QDX to reach JK, and occasionally even had multiple responses to my CQ with it, the performance of the QDX was so much more impressive, even with the same antenna, power level, etc. (In fact it makes me wonder if I assembled my QDX wrong… a puzzle for another day perhaps.) 12 QSOs and 10 points in the bag. After White Horse we discovered that there was not a simple path to get to Shadows: due to a bit of lingering snow on the ground and general slipperiness, we ended up having to backtrack and it took significantly longer to reach Shadows than expected. After a slippery and steep ascent, had another lovely activation of Shadows, just as effortless thanks to the KX2. Another 16 QSOs and 10 points in the bag. After this we took a scenic and unexpectedly long walk back to the car, and decided 8 miles was enough for one day, and headed to a local brewery for a pint. One day down!
Wednesday: I decided to kick it up a notch Wednesday: 20 points a day just wasn’t going to cut it. So we got up a bit earlier and made more of an effort not to get lost. We started out with W7A/AE-037. Driving down the Forest Service road we were stopped by a sign indicating we needed a permit, but I had just enough cell signal to buy the permit online, so we continued down the road, to find a locked gate not 1/4 mile later. Whoops. After rereading the directions and proceeding down the road a ways further, we found the correct trail, right where everyone said it would be. After that it was a pleasant couple mile walk to the top. Deciding to hustle a bit more today, I grabbed my 7 QSOs, worked through my small pileup, and headed back down, 10 points richer. Next up was W7A/CS-013. This one looked like it once had a road going all the way to the top, but even our 4WD Jeep couldn’t make it up that (at least, not without a more skilled pilot than us, anyway!). After a short but steep climb, had a short and sweet activation, and a slippery walk back down. Another 10 points down. After this we drove over towards W7A/CS-031, but upon seeing the entrance to the National Monument and all the signs about not hking off trail, we decided to head instead to W7A/CS-045. We let Google Maps take us down some somewhat exciting back roads (hooray 4WD!) and eventually made it to a particularly sketchy road at the base of the mountain, and decided to walk from there. In fact we could have probably driven up: we saw someone else driving up in a pickup truck as we were leaving! But we were not so brave, so we just enjoyed a very spiral-y walk to the top, and another hurried activation, so as to avoid driving the dirt roads in the dark. 8 points in the bag, and another day at a close. We decided to enjoy a nice dinner in town to celebrate a new personal best: 28 points in one day!
Thursday: Today we decided it was time to get serious, and try to hit even more mountains than Wednesday. To tip the scales in our favor, I saved a collection of mountains with easy drives and shorter walks for the same day. Unfortunately this did mean I didn’t get to spend much time on each summit, so I didn’t get to contact as many people as I’d normally like, but these summits were also some of the most popular in Flagstaff with over 100 activations each, so not super rare. We started with W7A/CS-023. As others reported, you have to drive down some roads through private land that didn’t look terribly inviting, but just as expected there’s public land on the other side, and we were able to drive up an established logging road to reach a saddle and hike the rest of the way. It was pretty steep, but overall a pretty nice hike. At the top we were met with a swarm of ladybugs, who did their best to get into every nook and cranny of every bag and item of clothing we brought, so we didn’t spend too long there before heading down. Next we headed west down the road, hitting W7A/CS-032. An easy drive and a straightforward hike, and we found a ladybug swarm on this summit too! I guess they meet up on Thursdays on mountaintops. We were getting thoroughly crawled on so we didn’t spend much time there either before heading back. Next we headed to W7A/CS-038. There were multiple warnings on the DB about avoiding the private property, but we found the boundary of the forest land was quite well-marked with signs that looked pretty new, so that was no issue. The gate was open into the forest area, so we drive a little ways in on a logging road and cut a few minutes off the hike before heading up. This was yet another short but steep hike. We did encounter what looked like a carcass of a maybe 4-point Elk arrow conspicuously sticking out of its back half. I guess neither the hunter nor the elk got lucky that time. After an otherwise uneventful climb, and a thankfully reduced number of ladybugs, another summit in the bag. At this point we were thinking, 30 points in a day seemed pretty good, and we were pretty much done hiking. But then I remembered that we’d gone far enough West at that point to be near a drive-up, so we rounded out the day with a pleasant drive up W7A/CS-026 to catch the sunset and bag one more mountain. A great view, and 40 points in one day! Definitely a new personal record.
Friday was our last day, and we had to check out and fly home. But we had a late flight, so we still had time for another summit! I had planned to do another double-header with W7A/CS-040 and W7A/CS-037, but when we arrived, I found there was a new-looking barbed wire fence surrounding W7A/CS-040, and W7A/CS-037 looked awfully far away and I wasn’t sure I had time. So after confirming that W7A/CS-031 was actually outside the National Monument boundary, I headed that way instead. This was a pleasant walk up a fire road followed by a slippery walk up mostly loose pebbles, but at least there weren’t any ladybugs this time. After that we were running out of time before needing to head back to catch our flight, but I thought we might have just enough time to visit W7A/CS-003. However, on the way there, we encountered a road closed to vehicle traffic, and we didn’t have time to hike the entire way there and back and still make our flight, so we headed on to Phoenix. Sitting there in the car, I realized that the total points for the trip so far had made it to 98 points, and it sure would be nice to break 100. So on the drive south I quickly looked over all the mountains I could find which were on the way to the airport and worth at least 2 points, and settled on W7A/MN-144. However, by the time we arrived, it was pretty much sunset, and it closed at sunset! So we very quickly diverted to W7A/MN-145. We did my fastest activation ever, rushing up the mountain in 20 minutes, setting up, activating, and tearing down in about 20 minutes, and rushing back down in the dark in another 20 minutes. Phew! I’m sorry to any chasers who didn’t get a chance to make a contact, but we were really not sure we were going to make it to our flight! But we made it down, and we made our flight in the end. What a trip!
Final Thoughts
In 4 days, we did 11 summits, for a grand total of 100 points exactly. That’s over a third of my lifetime total, so I’m pretty happy. We hiked about 26 miles or so, but only 6600 feet or so of vertical. That is a much more favorable points-to-effort ratio than where I live! And it was great to get out and spend a few days in nature. And to stretch the legs of my new KX2 - I’m thoroughly impressed!
One thing that was surprising to me was how few of the SOTA mountains in Flagstaff had trails to the summit: even the summits with >100 activations rarely had trails to the top. Maybe that says more about the kinds of people who do summits in Flagstaff vs California, I’m not sure, but it was interesting. But it totally invalidated my initial assumption that summits with many activations would be easy to climb! Go figure.
Thanks to all 67 chasers who contacted me on this trip! And a special thanks to WB6POT and NT6E, who contacted me on 9 and 8 summits, respectively, out of 11. Wow!
Overall it was a great trip! I’m hoping to take more SOTA-focused trips again in the future, so if anyone else has any suggestions for SOTA destinations, I’d love to hear them!