Return To The SOTA Titans: Black Dome And Blackhead
Last year successful activations of Black Head and Black Dome Mountains (June 2021) put me over the 100 point mark for Summits-On-The-Air (SOTA). Just of a year later the two 10-point twins put me over the 300 mark. As many of you know, I need a thousand points to be eligible for the SOTA Mountain Goat award.
That’s AA1F’s truck parked at the trailhead below, and the trailhead map below. I added the insert that shows our destinations.
The trail is tough, but not particularly obnoxious. Our chosen path took us up the saddle between Black Dome (W2/GC-003) and Blackhead (W2/GC-056) Mountains. Early on in the hike, AA1F and Nellie posed in front of a massive root ball of a fallen tree for the second year in a row.
The climb up the saddle trail finishes at the ridge. And as you can see from the photo below, each of the nearly 4000-foot peaks is 0.6 miles away in opposite directions.
We went up Black Dome first. The view below is Black Dome as seen from the trail up Blackhead. The setting sun turns the eastern side of the mountain a mysterious dark shade that I am sure is responsible for its name.
Goofy selfie time while AA1F activates Black Dome Mountain.
Despite the IARU HF World Championship contest being in full swing, we were able to find a bit of bandwidth on 20M to set up our SOTA shop at. We completed the activation in a hurry and headed over the Blackhead Mountain. Below you can see our destination from the trail down Black Dome.
We backtracked to the saddle trail and began ascending Blackhead. AA1F, ahead of me as usual, had an interesting encounter. He had noticed that someone appeared on the trail in front of him, but then inexplicably disappeared, seeming to run away. AA1F’s theory was that he, ummmm, caught someone in the act of, ummmmm, emptying their bladder.
So AA1F continued up the trail. After a few minutes he ran in to the mysterious stranger who informed him that he had run away back up the trail because he thought Nellie (our dog) was a bear! We tried to capture the essence of Nellie looking like a bear in a photograph, but probably doesn’t do justice to what the poor hallucinating man thought he was seeing…
Here is our Radio-Dog-I.-E.-Not-A-Bear looking like a regular old ham about to make some contacts below.
On Blackhead, we chased some of the IARU contest stations for our necessary four QSOs. AA1F then spotted me so that I could let the chasers have a proper activation. Despite the difficult band conditions, I still managed about ten contacts. Combined with our Black Dome QSOs, we also had enough contacts for another successful activation of the Catskill State Park (K-8070).
Heading down, we stopped for another picture of the Black Dome. We would retrace our steps and go back down the sadde trail. This is a little different from the last time when we went down a different way in order to make a loop out of the trip.
There is comfort in the familiar. Working our way over the same ground, with the same destinations, and the same goals. But the mountains are constantly changing and memory is a fickle thing. Nothing on a trail is exactly how you remember it. Because, in life, nothing is exactly how you remember it.
There are so many yellow brick roads to follow. To end up on the same path twice may seem exceedingly dull. But that path is never really the same the second time around, is it?
And this is what its all about. The nuanced variations in our rituals, habits, and experiences. A daily walk to the corner store punctuated by the surprise of finding an abandoned twenty dollar bill blowing down the sidewalk. Or being inexplicably alone on a usually overcrowded beach on a beautiful hot day. They say variety is the spice of life. They just fail to mention that variety in small increments can be plenty spicy if you just tune it to its metaphorical taste.
The trail the second time up the Blackhead and Black Dome twins was theoretically the same. Regardless, the adventure has changed…the adventure will always change…
Dit. Dit.
KM1NDY