Acton

The Trip

Normally I wouldn’t attempt a summit unless I knew the weather was decent. But there are time when you get a break in the rain and have to say the hell with it. Thus, my activation of Sierra Pelona.

The drive needless to say was filled with fog and low visibility. I took the way Hal N6JZT had told me about, where you don’t have to walk the 3 miles to the summit. I pretty much could have driven to the summit but I stuck with the rules and hiked about a quarter mile. Most of this was me aimlessly wandering around the brush trying to find a high enough bush to block the wind.

Camping?

Camping- Inverted V

While this didn’t happen I ended up erecting my one man tent. This sucker saved me once before from the rain, and now it would do it for the fog and drizzle. Did I mention that there were patches of snow everywhere? Yeah, cold. But I had my fingertip-less gloves and my Zippo hand warmer so this made life better.

Contacts

Forty meters seemed pretty damn noisy for my liking. All that crap skip from overseas. I did manage to find a spot on 7.288 though.

So all cozy in my tent I started calling CQ… it only took two calls and I was picked up. Oh did I mention there is LTE up on this mountain? Yeah, that makes for a better activation.

All in all I only got 4 contacts. I didn’t have the patience to keep calling because it was chilly.

So I setup the inverted V for 20 meters. This would pose the be a waste of time as the band was pretty much dead, and so was 17 meters. So I packed up the radio, tent and dipole.

Once I was done I used my backpacking stove to boil some water and make coffee. It really hit the spot with my cliff bar.

FT-817

Leaving

Before I went I was treated with a beautiful view of the snow dusted San Gabriel Mountains. Then on the drive down I wish I was dark again because there were a lot of steep drop offs.

San Gabriels

Thank you Chasers!

Chasers