Non-Summit Summits-On-The-Air: Utilizing The Activation Zone On Mount Shaw

“No, I’m serious, I wouldn’t have done it if I knew it was this long.” It dawned on AA1F that this really would be nearly a 7 mile hike. I caught him eating a sandwich at the top of the toughest stretch of Mount Shaw. With over 2300 feet of vertical gain, and an extremely long and steep section, this little, sub-3000 foot mountain could be formidable on the best of summer days. But it wasn’t summer. In fact, it was 20 degrees with a wind chill of -6F according to the forecast. A fresh coat of a few inches of snow obscured all but the two sets of footprints we were following. The sun, however, was bright, and the sky was relatively clear.

Now, the ridiculousness of AA1F’s comment was that this was his third time up Mount Shaw since the summer of 2020. He knew how long this trek was! The other bit was that we had a sort of “discussion” this morning about whether we should hike it today or not. Really, it was me attempting to discuss, and him sulking in disappointment at the thought of not going. “I figured I’d eat here. I’m running out of steam…” In more than a quarter of a century of hiking together, he had never randomly stopped to eat before reaching whatever our stated destination was. I was a bit worried, well, that AA1F was running out of steam…

In fact, we had just ran in to two other guys on their way down the steep section. “This part really kicked our butts going up!” one of the the twenty-something-year-old kids said to me in passing. AA1F had just given one his hat back…we had found it sitting in the middle of the trail a mile or so ago, and brought it with us thinking we may pass by its owner sooner or later. In fact, losing things on Mount Shaw had been a bit of a trend I guess. A bottle of fruit punch Gatorade fell out of my bag without me knowing during a difficult stream crossing. And then a little later on, one of my shoe traction devices had fallen off my right boot. AA1F backtracked down hill a bit to retrieve it for me.

Summits-On-The-Air, as most of you know, is a ham radio game in which you hike mountains and make radio contacts for points. It has a few technicalities. The first is that you can obtain three “winter bonus points” on selected summits before March 15. So, Mount Shaw, normally worth 4 points, would be worth 7 today. The second is that you need to activate within the “activation zone” of a mountain, not necessarily at the exact summit. The activation zone is defined as within 25 vertical meters of the actual summit elevation. This is really so you do not have to activate in an area a lot of other hikers may be congregating at. Lets just say we took advantage of both rules today.

After traversing Mount Shaw’s steep headwall, the trail is mostly a large flat carriage trail with a gentle grade to the top. But quite frankly, I was tired and so was AA1F. Although the trail was hardpacked, it was deep enough at this summit approach to want to use snowshoes, which we had left in truck. The going was slow and laborious. So, for this SOTA activation, we never reached the actual summit of Shaw. Instead, I watched the GPS until our elevation was within the activation zone. And once the elevation on my GPS read 2927 (see the picture above), I knew we were okay to operate. Mount Shaw has an elevation of 2990 feet. We shaved at least a half mile off of our trip and, well, that was okay with us.

Within minutes, I had the 20M EFHW antenna sitting in the trees parallel to the trail. AA1F set the Yaesu FT-891 on the ground pad I had carried up. Cell service was spotty, but eventually we got a break and spotted ourselves on 14.239 MHz. Twelve contacts and eleven minutes later, we were packing up and heading down hill. If you take a look at the GPS picture above, you can see that it was 4:34pm, and once again we would be pushing daylight. We had already spent four hours on the mountain.

On the way back down the trail, as we neared the intimidating stream crossing once again, AA1F yelled out “There’s your Gatorade!” I imagine its the guy whose hat we saved that propped my previously opened bottle on the snow covered rock.

“Do you think its safe to drink?” Thirsty, and tempted by this offering of trail magic, we split the contents. Neither of us believed anyone contaminated the beverage – people are typically kind in the woods. The fruit punch drink was starting to freeze, and its slurry of ice actually felt good, having worked up a sweat despite the cold.

We made it back to the truck safe and sound and headed home 7 points closer to the SOTA Mountain Goat… Now, I only need 770 more…

KM1NDY