One Point A Mile: Activating Mount Garfield For Summits-On-The-Air (And A Bonus Bonefide UFO Sighting)
Mt. Garfield in the Franconia Range of the White Mountains is not actually a difficult hike. Sure its 4500 feet in elevation, the 17th tallest “4000 footer” in New Hampshire, and a solid 10 mile round trip walk with a 3000 foot vertical gain…but its still…Easy. Ish. It’s kind of an endurance mountain, if there is such a thing. For most of the way up, AA1F, Nellie our dog, and I were making nearly 2 miles an hour. And as one of the world’s slowest hikers who admittedly hates walking up hills, that is actually pretty fast for me. Especially with about 20 pounds of gear on my back. The trail was extremely well graded due to the fact it was an old tower road, making it seem essentially like a walk in the park…with a few twists…
After nearly 5 miles, the Garfield Trail from the parking area stops at the Garfield Ridge Trail, which is actually the Appalachian Trail. The Garfield Summit (which is not shown in the sign below) is 0.2 miles up the trickiest part of the trail, a fairly steep rocky scramble. Nellie, tired at this point, would need to be hoisted up quite a few of the rock outcroppings. The weather at the base on this late September day was hovering around 50 degrees. By the time we reached the AT, we could see our breaths and bare skin was getting quickly frostbit.
Overall, this last 2/10ths of a mile would not be particularly challenging. However, this is where the fickle mountain weather took a toll. At some point, there must have been an ice storm on the summit of Mt. Garfield. The trees were covered in ice. With the relentless and strong winds, the ice would fall like daggers from the trees and shower down on us in chunks, bouncing off our heads.
The rocks were coated in ice.
And that ice was accumulating, and then melting, creating a slushy mess out of the trail. In fact, most of the trail was a running stream, more noticeable on the way back down than up, and we essentially had to slosh through 10 miles of puddles in order to hike Mt. Garfield and back. My feet were soaking wet the entire hike; thank goodness for wool socks!
On Garfield’s summit, the remnants of the watch tower remain. Hikers would quickly climb to the exposed ledge, take a few pictures, and retreat to the shelter of the trees. The wind was relentless and strong enough to move me when standing still.
I too climbed up and took in the views from the tower foundation.
It was right about here that my hat blew off my head and AA1F went running for it despite my protests. I worried he’d be blown right off the side of the mountain. Heroically, he retrieved my two dollar highway rest stop purchase, and I reminded myself to get a better hat.
A cloud covered Mt. Lafayette…
And a few moments later, an ice-capped Mt. Lafayette… (the hazy look on the peak is not an illusion…its a blanket of ice.)
By now, my love of tarps should be well-known to anyone who reads this blog. I simply do not hike anymore without one. I set up an extremely crude shelter by tying a rope between two trees. I tied two corners of the tarp to the rope at each tree. And then I simply bunched up the tarp and knotted it around the rope in the middle. I was fighting what was probably 40 or 50 mph winds to get this done. You can see the billowing of the tarp below. Next, I simply threw all of our gear on the tarp in order to weight it down. The rest of the tarp, we used as a ground cloth. This is the quickest way I know of to deploy a tarp for the purpose of using it as a windbreak. It works! And makes for a slightly cozier environment for a portable radio operation.
Finally getting down to the business of radio… I am setting up the 20M end-fed halfwave antenna. It would sit no higher than about 6 feet at its free end which I simply used a cable tie to loop over a branch of the shrubby wind-blown conifer in front of me.
Here you can see the radiator wire of the antenna and the unun tied off to a shrub.
And behind AA1F, you can see the proximity of the radiator wire to the operating area. You will also notice that I bring a sleeping pad (that orange mat which happens to be a Nemo Switchback Ultralight Sleeping Pad) with me on most hikes too. A tremendous amount of heat can be sucked out of the body by sitting directly on cold ground. A simple insulated, light weight, sleeping pad can be very helpful in avoiding hypothermia.
I especially bring the pad with me to give Nellie a place to lay down. Because not only is she a bit of a princess, she also has very little fur on her stomach. In fact, it was so cold on the summit, I regretted not bringing a sleeping bag for Nellie (something I usually do on winter hikes). You can see that the Yaesu FT-891, LDG Z100 Plus tuner, and 15ah Bioenno LiFePo battery are set up in the shelter. Propagation was on our side, and we quickly made our necessary contacts for the activation, including with some of our very favorite chasers, Gary W0MNA, Christian F4WBN, Darryl WW7D, and Kenneth K6HPX. Thanks as always friends! It was too cold to eat the pizza we carted up, so we quickly packed up and retreated back into the shelter of the woods.
The way back was a long trudge through essentially a stream bed. The trail was worse now than it had been on the way up, and we couldn’t quite tell where all of the water was coming from. Reminded us of the spring time thaw, except it was the beginning of autumn. We walked in water for 80% or so of the way back. The sun went down on us just as we were reaching the parking lot. I was grateful to be out of the woods, as even at an easy grade, a 10-mile hike with a full pack is still a lot. Our last mountain hike of around this size was Mt. Moosilauke, over a year ago. I was happy to get my 10 more SOTA points.
We hopped in the van, and I, an absolute lover of driving the open road, took us the two and a half hours home. The highway had a surprise for us tonight though. A mysterious light glowed in the sky. AA1F took pictures out the front window. It hovered for a while, and then quickly faded away. Gone. We came upon a car crash with four emergency vehicles, and theorized that the light was a spotlight of a helicopter. A little research led us to find that there were similar sightings by others in New Hampshire as well as in the Hudson Valley Region of New York. It coincided with a SpaceX satellite launch.
So, another New Hampshire 4000 footer, and another 10 point SOTA peak behind us…
I have been thinking about the stories we make up to explain things. AA1F and I had convinced ourselves that the UFO had something to do with the car crash we came upon. We had largely dismissed the possibility of it actually being some unidentified illuminated space object, figuring it must fit into some paradigm of what we already had knowledge of. We did not know about the SpaceX launch, and still are not sure if it is a sufficient explanation or not. The only facts we know were that there was a glowing object in the sky and we do not know what it was.
We twice heard extremely loud roaring noises in the woods along our hike. They sounded like highway noises, an 18-wheeler going over a pothole. Or potentially they were booms of thunder. But neither really seemed to explain it. Again we theorized. If not thunder, or the highway, could it be an animal? A bear roaring? A moose striking its antlers? Quite unlikely given the magnitude of the roar. We settled on it being most likely a tree falling. But we heard the noise twice, did we hear two trees fall? It was windy… AA1F did wonder about it being Bigfoot…
My point is, I tell myself stories to make sense of the world. But really I need to just acknowledge what I perceive as fact and not shape it into an explanation. Sometimes a light in the sky is unexplained. Sometimes the source of a noise in the woods remains unknown. Sometimes the motivations for the actions of others will never be illuminated. Ultimately it is about acceptance. Understanding and accepting that things are the way that they are. The mind will scramble for an explanation to alleviate stress and fear. Is that light in the sky or that sound in the woods a threat to my well-being? Sometimes we just don’t know. We will never know. The mountains teach me lessons. Acceptance is fearlessness. You do not fear the unknown, when you instead choose to accept it. What is, is.
Always yours,
KM1NDY