The long shadow of San Gabriel Peak stretching west at sunrise
13 NOVEMBER 2021 W6/CT-019
This was my fourth trip up San Gabriel Peak. I first hiked to this grand summit over 40 years ago with my friend Linnea Gardner. I left Topanga well before dawn to get to Eaton Saddle at 5:30 AM. I started out in the glow of the city lights far below, but was obliged to get the headlamp out to go through Mueller Tunnel shortly after starting out. It was a little spooky.
The hike is a little over a mile and a half with about 1,000 feet of elevation gain. I hoofed it to the top in about an hour and just missed the sunrise from the summit.
Cell coverage from Verizon was in and out but I did manage to get spots out via SOTAGoat eventually. I made 30 contacts – a record for me in my short SOTA career. I was the first one to the summit on this fine morning. However a number of other parties visited this popular mountain top during my two hour activation. I handed out a lot of SOTA cards to interested people. Perhaps even better than my first summit-to-summit with Wisconsin, even better than a DX QSO with Christian in France, was connecting with David N6AN and arranging to meet for the first time in La Cañada for a cuppa. I really got a kick out of meeting David as we have had many S2S QSOs.
For this activation I just threw up the Packtenna end fed random wire and it performed very well. All HF contacts were at 12 watts, all VHF contacts were at 5 watts.
A big thank you to all the chasers – so many loyal chasers really make this fun!
KG6MZS 