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Saturday, September 13th: Every once in a while a blind hog finds an acorn and such was the case with Brushy Face.  Brushy Face has been inactive as long as I’ve been involved in Summits On The Air and as such it was one of those summits that I secretly hoped no one would attempt and I would one day be able to claim it as first-activator.

Brushy Face presents a challenge in that the summit is on private property.  In fact, someone’s home sits right atop of the summit:

When I had originally scouted Brushy Face, I was new to SOTA and unfamiliar with a lot of the rules and regulations regarding activating a summit.  I thought my only alternative would be to knock on someone’s door and ask if they’d mind if I erected an antenna in their driveway for a few minutes.  In fact, there are ways that this summit could be activated so long as I was within 80 vertical feet of the summit, which is what I did.

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Friday, September 12th: The family has a place up in Highlands North Carolina so we make an effort to spend a couple-three weekends a year up there. I’m particularly fond of the area because it reminds me so much of time spent with my Grandparents who used to own a place near Boone. Of course, there’s a lot of good hiking in this area of Western North Carolina and that suits a young SOTA kid (as in baby goat) such as myself.

One such hike that has become a staple of our visits to Highlands has been Whiteside Mountain. As far as SOTA designated summits are concerned, I can’t think of an easier 8pt summit. And I can say that with confidence after hiking up it with a 40-pound pack containing baby, radio gear and water. Wife, baby AND dog accompanied me for this expedition.

Since it was Friday, there wasn’t as much foot traffic on the mountain as there usually is on the weekend. But there was at least a dozen folks on ropes at the top rappelling on the mountain. I had heard Whiteside was big with climbers, but I’d never had the occasion to see any until today. I imagine that had to do with their ropes crossing the trail at the top and the popularity of the mountain on the weekends

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I originally had other plans for Saturday, but they fell through.  Left with a wide-open Saturday, I planned a multi-activation SOTA expedition.  I even had my eyes on a few local inactivated mountains.  However, my wife commented that I had been out of the house the last four Saturdays in a row and wasn’t too keen on me skipping town for a fifth Saturday.  Knowing she’d let me go but I’d suffer for it later, I did the only thing I knew to get what I wanted: I invited her (and the baby) along.

Surprisingly, she agreed.

While I would still be able to do a SOTA activation, that meant that I had to be choosy about where we went which coincidentally also meant no new summits and it wouldn’t be a multi-activation kind of day.  The weather-guessers were saying it was expected to be the hottest day of summer, so I wanted to be especially sensitive in regards to taking the baby along.

I decided upon the next-nearest summit, Kennesaw Mountain, as it has plenty of shade all the way to the top along a well-traveled path.  Plus, I was very familiar with the hike and knew I could survive the trip with boy the radio AND baby strapped to my back.  Using my Father’s Day gift, an Osprey Poco Plus, I carried a well-behaved 14 month old, all my radio gear and a baby to the top of Kennesaw Mountain.  It wasn’t as difficult as I expected but took longer than I expected to lug what I estimated was approximately 40 pounds to the top.

Sarah entertained the kiddo while I began erecting my antenna.  I’d never seen so much foot traffic at the top of any mountain I’ve ever been on, so not surprisingly I was getting all sorts of long stares and questions about what I was doing.  As I was stretching out my cordage for the antenna and raising my carbon fiber mast, I had three separate individuals ask me where I was going to go fishing.  To their credit, the mast IS a fishing pole.

All fishing jokes aside, the most common question I got was how far away was I able to talk to other stations.  Today it just happened to be Arizona or Colorado, but the onlookers appeared quite impressed with that sort of distance.  I was just happy to talk to anyone, it didn’t matter how far away they were. 🙂

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Late Friday evening I dropped an alert that if everything lined up, I intended on activating Sweat Mountain during the ARRL VHF contest.  I also followed it up with a rambling blog post, because 60 characters sometimes isn’t enough to explain the details surrounding a mountain activation.

My priority was to meet up with a fellow Ham and work as many stations as we could and before we packed up to head home for the evening, I would activate the mountain.  Unfortunately, we got started much later in the afternoon than I had anticipated and I never bothered to update my alert to let anyone paying attention know that I was going to be late, if at all.

In hindsight, I probably should have done that as a courtesy to others but by my estimation (looking at my web logs), only two people clicked on the link to my blog from the alert I posted on SOTAWatch anyway.  So to those two individuals, I apologize.

While my activities during the VHF contest weren’t anything to write home about, the adventure to activate Sweat Mountain turns out to be blog-worthy.  I’ll start by saying that it’s the activation that almost wasn’t.

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