Hiking up to a POTA

Over the weekend it was so beautiful out that it was a great day to go and play some radio at a park. Talking to KB8OGP she had looked at the weather and suggested we go up into the mountains a bit as it was supposed to be pretty hot! So glad we went with that suggestion! Looking at a new park we decided on US-9613 Bergen Peak State Park. Looking at the satellite imagery and the park map there were two spots that looked like it would be good to activate from. So when we got there we parked the car at the north end parking area. There is a locked gate to allow park vehicles to go up so we put the radio gear in a bag and KB8OGP carried the telescoping mast and we started up the park road. At the end there is an open field which would be okay to operate from but heading west-ish from there we could go up another appx. 120 feet and end up on a small peak. There was a path that go us half way there and the rest we simply went directly up. The views were gorgeous and while hiking there was a hawk that lazily went of the sky directly above us which was awesome to see!

Getting up the the top we got setup and looked up some other parks to get some initial P2P. Oh boy is reception up about 9660 feet rather good! We made a quick contact and to my surprise the handheld was receiving N0LNT who was up a SOTA at W0C/SR-035 (Mount Flora) so made a quick 2m contact! Nice thing is this counted for both a SOTA and a POTA (for US-4400). That was a lot of fun!

Getting back to 20m we made a couple more P2Ps and then started calling CQ. Contacts came in quick and ended up working F5PYI in France! Haven’t gotten many DX POTA contacts so this was pretty exciting! I was listening to the pileup we had going and their callsign jumped out to me.

We continued making contacts until we were both getting pretty hungry and so we packed up and headed down. The views were just as good on our way down. Getting everything in the car we drove down into Evergreen and had some amazing lunch!

Overall it was a great time and looking forward to going back to the park at some point!

Equipment used for this activation: