A month or so ago, my friend Adam (K6ARK)
asked me if I was interested in joining an expedition to the Holcomb Valley area
near Big Bear to have a little Summits On The Air (SOTA) fun. I was definitely in. Adam did some planning and sent over some
charted peaks that we could do and announced the expedition on a So Cal SOTA
mailing list. It’s a pretty big list but
people are busy and have varying interests so the only takers for the trip were
Adam, myself, and W6RIP, Kevin, who lives not too far away from the planned area of operation. Adam has a friend that owns a piece of land
that was next to the campground and let us setup there for base camp. It was a perfect central area, complete with
some small cabins, outdoor cooking and R&R area with wood burning
stove.
The plan was to drive up Friday and hike and play with
radios on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday.
I was pretty stoked. Unfortunately
the trip was cut short by a day as Adam had an unexpected work trip. That worked out for me since I really needed
to spend some time with my daughter and do some stuff and I’ll be traveling next
weekend.
Leading up to the expedition I spent some time charting
all the peaks in the area that I was given from Adam. In addition, I tried to lay out a path to
each of the peaks in case I was going to be on my own. I'm unfamiliar with the area, so I spent
some time charting a ingress point and the best course up to each peak. I know I wouldn’t be able to do all of these
but we weren’t sure which ones we would prioritize. With an return on Saturday we would only be
able to hit a few. The idea was that if
several other operators showed up, we’d split up a bit and do different peaks
and conduct some summit-to-summit comms as well. That’s always kinda fun. Unfortunately, a lot of guys that wanted to
come had other things going on this weekend.
The trip was a great success in my eyes, as I was able to
make contacts in New Zealand, Russia, Puerto Rico, Finland, Japan, Canada, and
the mainland US and all but one of those was Friday night!!! This is the most number of countries I’ve
ever had during a trip and it was all thanks to Adams suggestion that we
activate a mountain at night during a world-wide ham contest. Russia is also a first for me and I had two
contacts there. There was a major world-wide contest going on. That meant that all of the major stations with
really big “ears” were working and we’d have a better chance at doing some DX. The airways were packed Friday night and
Saturday. Let’s break the trip down
summit by summit.
