Hello everyone,
It’s been quite a while since I did my last summit, so I took advantage of the fact that I was in Alberta to go do some SOTA! And what an activation it was.
Important fact to get out of the way first. I put the alert in correctly as JF-087, but I kept spotting myself at JF-086, a summit I had previously done. E-mails have been sent to those Hams that I made contacts with (except to VE6LCE, who doesn’t have his e-mail on QRZ).
Starting off, there had been severe thunderstorms the night before, so the ground and brush at the beginning of the trail was quite wet. My hiking shoes (which I may have to exchange for proper hiking boots), socks and pants were completely soaked through in the first 5 minutes. I ventured off down what I though was the “trail”, a small path about half a foot wide through the brush in a small valley. Taking a quick look at my GPS, it seemed to line up, so I continued on fat, dumb and happy along this path until I had crossed a stream and eventually checked my GPS again. There was no stream to cross, I was supposed to have turned into the forest to my left several hundred feet earlier. Oh well, I backtracked, crossed the stream at a different point and made my way into the bush, looking for the trail.
I eventually came across what looked like another path, and after crawling over several fallen trees, steep slopes and rotten logs, I had finally found a trail marker! I continued up the summit looking for markers as I went along. Which made life a lot easier, except when it didn’t. The markers had been up there for some time and there had been a lot of severe weather recently. Many of the trees that had trail tape on them had fallen over or had the tape ripped off. And for those sections that still had good marking, there were piles of fallen trees to climb over. For a trail that was only 1.5 miles long that I planned an hour for, it was going to take much longer. I eventually got to climb a rock face that took me to a decent spot to get a good view of the other summits in the area but it was only a quarter of the way to the top.
The rest of the climb was pretty uneventful, the only really annoying part were the bugs, which were horrendous (I reapplied bug spray several times on this activation, my hotel room now smells like a gym bag that had a bottle of OFF! explode inside of it). Once I got to the top, I set up my ATAS-25 and FT-818 and then proceeded to wring out my socks and attempted to dry out my shoes. After that, I got calling!
Band conditions were terrible. Not a single signal on 40m or 30m but 20m and 17m were completely rammed with no room for my 2.5 Watts. 2m was a bust as well. After about 2 and a half hours of calling and chasing, I finally got my contacts, including a S2S. It was at this point that I realised that I had been spotting myself through APRS2SOTA at JF-086 (Deer Peak) and not JF-087 (Stony NW3). I had done Deer Peak on a previous outing and must have just got them mixed up. Ah well.
After I packed up and put on my semi-dry socks and shoes. I started making my way down the summit. Thinking that it might be easier than that way up. I thought wrong. I took a wrong turn at two markers and ended up on the wrong side of the summit. After about 20-30 minutes of bushwhacking, contouring, and sliding I finally found my way back to the trail and down to the rental car for the long drive home. It was truly an activation for the books.
73,
Andrew VE3YTP
