I’ve day hiked this a few times, but it’s part of the TRT so lets go bag another summit today. While driving in I bumped into one of my SAR buddies James and his wife, and they were going up to Trimmer peak (not a SOTA summit). I walked with James and his wife up to the pass on the Rim Trail that sends you to Freel peak. They went North, I went South. Not a lot to say on this hike, pretty easy walk as there is a trail all the way to the summit, no crazy off trail adventures where I took most of the day just to get to the summit etc.. So I got three contacts pretty quick, and it was a lot of familiar voices, NS7P, K6HPX, thanks you two! A new chaser for me in New Hampshire had me at a 3×3, so that I think is now my furthest summit QSO to date. At this rate, I had four, and I was not really doing anything else today, so I decided to just sit on top and S2S chase. I ended up in two hours getting 11 contacts (seems kinda weak) however 7 of them were S2S, I did a lot of waiting and watching on sotawatch for alerts/spots. The conditions are bad, I understand it, but so many more CW activators then SSB, and I’m not proficient enough at CW to really start chasing those guys and trying to compete. Hopefully next year I’ll get strong enough with cw that I’ll start chasing etc. Anyway, I snagged a 2m contact with WC6J on a peak not too far from me. KK6QMS was on Mount Whitney (W6/SN-001), so I’ll have a SOTA complete here pretty soon, I’m pretty sure I’ll go hike Whitney again at some point. I managed to hit W4T, W5N (a buddy of mine was activating there, so fun to finally chase/S2S him), a couple of to W0C, and W7O.
It was a mellow hike down too, starting to feel that fall coolness in the air in the early evening.
I have 19 peaks remaining on my TRT challenge, up next I will be doing a backpack to knock out the last of the W7N peaks between Mount Rose, and Spooner summit so stay tuned for another report in a couple of weeks. Now that I have knocked out a two-fer day with Dicks/Tallac I’m thinking I know what I need to do to get the three-fer that make up Mt Rose, Houghton, and Tamarack in a single day and include some hiking to setup for the last two peaks along the Nevada portion of the TRT.
I really want to get the last 3 peaks finished in the southern end of the basin, and those might not be a single weekend. I really ventured off script of what would have probably been an efficient plan, and I’m going to have two work doubly hard to knock out the last 19 before Dec 31.
N6JFD's Sota Blog 