SOTA’s Heartbreak Hill

All it takes to feel like quitting is for the journey to be long enough. I remember joking on my now long-deleted ham radio twitter account that it would take me a decade to achieve my Mountain Goat — the coveted title bestowed upon you once you reach a thousand SOTA activator points. I am in my seventh season, and at 829 points, still have the equivalent of 17 four-thousand footers left to climb.

Bob AC1Z, New England’s reigning SOTA king who just achieved his 6th(!) Mountain Goat, and his wife Karen, hosted the increasingly well-attended annual W1 SOTA Campout this past long weekend. A crowd of activators and chasers, by now our old friends, gathered at the Dolly Copp campground, a small patch of humanity in the vast wilderness of the Presidential Range in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. AA1F celebrated the milestone of lugging our new travel trailer up there from its usual spot on our upstate NY farm for its first ever road trip. The convergence of radio and mountains draws in a particular type of people that I love. People with a deep shared understanding of why we do this peculiar hobby of ours. Even when the words needed to accurately describe our motivation fail to exist.

AA1F and I started ambitiously. We were going to climb Mount Field on Thursday (we did), Mount Hale on Friday (we did not), and Mount Waumbek on Saturday (we did). Some of you may remember that I actually ran over AA1F’s entire backpack filled with his radio gear at the base of Mount Hale at the 2023 W1 SOTA Campout. This round, our old friend Hale did not make the cut, well, because, quite frankly, we were tired. Field wiped us out.

Mount Field — named after the first known European climber of Mount Washington in 1642, Darby Field — is 4,327 feet in elevation, and if you also climb up over Mount Avalon, over 2700 feet in total elevation gain in just shy of 6 miles round trip.

AA1F, our shepherd Georgia, and I decided to indeed take the Avalon trail over to Field.

And that half mile climb up to the Mount Avalon spur trail looked like this…

…Like someone went to a quarry and dumped truckloads of misfit rocks down the side of a cliff. The grade is difficult to show in that picture above, but it is tremendously steep and a lot of attention needs to be paid to foot placement in order to avoid falling a long ways down. All I kept thinking was why would anyone think this was a good idea for a trail?! And I hoped we would clear it before sunset on the way back down.

We did eventually reach the spur trail, a short but steep hike to the top of Mount Avalon. Complete with a phenomenal view of Mount Washington itself!

But even more interesting to me was that we could see my van (lovingly dubbed “Limey”), approximately 1500 feet below us. The picture does not do it justice, but it’s — you guessed it — unmistakable green color was obvious even from that far away!

We now set off for Mount Field…

And this is as close as I got to taking a picture at the peak…

The GPS tells the story…

Our activation of Mount Field took nearly 8 hours and 38 minutes to complete. And over four hours of that was “stopped” time. This is in part because I am slow and take a lot of breaks. And we rested at the top of Avalon for a bit. But more importantly, because we could not make our four contacts at Field needed to complete the activation. We had 12 watts of HF from the Elecraft KX2 with a 40M EFHW antenna. And we had 5W from the Yaesu FT-60 handitalkie into a roll-up J-pole. And we could not get a QSO. We were on the summit for hours and considered giving up. Fortunately and eventually, we managed to drum up some local VHF FM contacts and completed our activation. We were so tired (and frustrated) by the time we got back to the campsite that we decided to take Friday off…

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By Saturday, we were ready to go again, and this time decided to hike Mount Waumbek (4006′) via Mount Starr King (3907′), a 7+ mile hike with again about 2700 feet of elevation gain.

The black flies on the way up weren’t so bad, but at the summit of Starr King, I needed to put on my bug net. AA1F, who had been waiting for about 45 minutes for me to finally arrive at the summit, already had his on.

We took the Kilkenny Ridge trail from Starr King to Waumbek, set up the FT-60 with the roll-up J-pole (build instructions here) and quickly made our contacts needed to complete the activation. That’s AA1F recreating the action shot.

And just to try to prove I was here too, I took a selfie on the Waumbek summit. Not that you really can tell where I am… In total we managed to rack up 20 SOTA activator points.

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Let me revisit my first sentence: All it takes to feel like quitting is for the journey to be long enough.

The SOTA journey has been long enough and I feel like quitting. Fred WX1S got his Goat a few weeks ago. In New England, i.e. “W1”, there are only 11 Mountain Goats. And points-wise, I am next in line. And I am ready to tap out. I have reached my “Heartbreak Hill“.

Sometimes young folks just starting to get their feet onto the rungs of their career ladders ask me for advice. I assure them that eventually all work becomes work, and ultimately it is better to be good at what you do than be passionate about it. The call it work for a reason… Go to work. Do you work. And go home. And then, and then, go do what you are actually passionate about.

What happens when your hobby becomes work too? I have trudged up 163 mountains (okay occasionally by car or gondola, but usually by foot) for this game. On average I have spent about 6 hours or more driving to and from each of these trailheads. I have taken entire vacations that revolved around summit activations. My dogs have been up nearly all of these peaks, first my dear sweet Nellie, and now Georgia the Peaches. I have spent a solid one-seventh of my life on SOTA. I will have to get up no less than seventeen more 4000 footers (one of which would have to be done in the winter) in order to finally get my Mountain Goat. And many more if they are shorter mountains. If we spend 6 hours on each mountain and 6 hours driving, then we still have 200+ straight hours of SOTA left. And if we extrapolate out those same metrics, we have already spent nearly 2000 hours (the unbelievable equivalent of 49 work weeks!) chasing our ham radio goal. Are you tired of this yet? Because I am. Does the fact that there are only eleven SOTA Mountain Goats in New England make some sense now?

Will I stop? Absolutely not. Not until I get my Goat. AA1F and I, back when he was just Marc and I was just Mindy, once hiked the Northville-Placid Trail. When we reached the Lake Durant Campground, about two-thirds or so through the 140 mile hike, the ranger who checked us in to our campsite made an off-hand comment: “A lot of people make the call here.” I was exhausted, hungry, and had literally walked off two toenails on my right foot. He might as well have been speaking Greek, because I could not at all process what he was trying to say to us. What call did people make? Was I forgetting to do something? It wasn’t until I managed to eat a meal and took my first shower in over a week that I got it. The ranger meant that a lot of people quit at this point of the NPT. They make that call to have someone come get them. They throw in their towel. Well, I sure as hell felt like quitting. But. It never once occurred to me to actually do so.

Eventually all work becomes work. So do hobbies apparently. And any journey that becomes long enough you will inevitably feel like quitting. But achievement is only found in one universal direction. Keep moving forward.

My Heartbreak Hill. I am ready to leave SOTA behind. But I will crawl over broken glass if I have to. To get that Goat.

Always thinking of you.

KM1NDY