May 2023 – Backcountry Saunters

The last eight months were filled with a lot of travel, a few continents, 1 new state for me, and some time South of the equator. That said it is now time to head back to work for the summer! Earlier in the year I had planned to make this year a collection of a lot of new unique peaks as well as picking up some completes from chases and S2S over the years. Although the huge winter and me ditching most of my snow/winter worthy gear is keeping me to lower levels and easier more familiar peaks like NS-248, TR-027 etc. That said I do have some backpacking and road trips planned both North of Hwy 80, and up into the Whites. For thsoe that have never looked at the W6 map, definitely check out White Mountain road. With a few days and some full batteries for your kit there are approximately ten summits within an hour walk of White Mountain Road (most are shorter than that).

So most of my summer will be spent on Donner Summit which has my second favorite view (the view from Rainbow Bridge over Donner Lake), and the good news is I have a lot of untapped peaks up there to go after that well I just avoided for years of living in South Lake Tahoe.

TTFN, next up is me just babbling about some mindfulness practices I have used for years, but are at least worth writing about 😀

73 de N6JFD

I love it when a plan comes together, however it is much more satisfying getting lucky and being in the right place at the right time. One of those days I just happened to check the reflector I noticed a posting about the JA/VK/NZ/EU S2S party scheduled for 1, April, and we just happened to be in New Zealand to boot. So far this trip, SOTA had been somewhat frustrating, there are only about 10 CW chasers total between AU and NZ, and the sun was acting like a prima donna being all kinds of super active. To the point I should have been able to see the Aurora Australis when we were in Queenstown, NZ except that it decided to cloud over and rain that night. Also to boot, for some silly reason that escapes me I decided to leave my QCX Mini (18mhz edition) at home, so all I had with me was the MTR3. 3 bands, CW only and NONE of those bands were having it during daylight hours. That said while we had been traveling, I had taken it upon myself to do a couple of night activations, and those were where I made the bulk of my DX and had some fun activations. One on Mt Kaputar (VK2/NW-001), and Mt John (ZL3/CB-625).

I also just happened to be staying at a friends house in Christchurch who lived a 30 minute walk from the AZ of Mt Pleasant (ZL3/CB-822), so the idea of another fun evening/sunset activation that also happened to overlook the ocean and parts of Christchurch was quite appealing. This activation ended up being my most productive activation of the 2 months down under, and I managed to work 9 different countries, all on 20M. Five contacts were actual S2S contacts, and the breakdown of DX was Germany, France, Hungary, Switzerland, Spain, Australia, Czech Republic, Greece, and Italy. I operated for about 2 hours, and enjoyed the views to be had, but once QSOs dried up it was time to walk down. Oddly enough, no JA stations on this activation, despite the couple of times I managed JA in VK land.

Some parting shots.