Looking south from Mount Gleason Strawberry Peak and San Gabriel Peak are almost perfectly in line. Some large Jeffrey pines on the summit of Mount Gleason survived the Station Fire to provide shade for hot SOTA operators.
17 JULY 2021 W6/CT-017 and W6/CT-087
I felt like doing a couple of easy activations after spending a week in the High Sierra Nevada. Mount Gleason and Summit 6,020′ have been long walks or mountain bike rides from Mill Creek Summit, where the gate has been locked for years. Chatter on the SoCalSOTA i/o group alerted me to the fact that the gate was now open this summer, so I gave these two summits a whirl.
Part of me wanted to make up for the 10 points I didn’t get on Mount Hooper because I only had one legitimate contact. Enough to activate the summit, but no points
The “hike” to Gleason is about a half mile from the locked gate across mostly level ground. I found I could not post my spot to SOTA Goat even though I had some cell service from Verizon. This was true of both summits. For these activations I used the Garmin InReach Mini largely because I wanted to test that method out for the first time. It worked flawlessly.
Between both peaks I had 33 contacts, including 3 different summit-to-summit contacts with KN6FNY. Kevin did 5 mountains this day. I had 6 total S2S contacts including two with N6AN on “David’s Summit” (formerly Flint Peak). My furthest contact was Chris F4WBN in France.
KG6MZS 