Kern, Ventura and Santa Barbara Wilderness. This is the upper Cuyama River watershed off Cerro Noroestre
4 DECEMBER 2021 W6/SC-001
Recovering from some health issues, I decided to do a couple of what I thought would be easy ones — Cerro Noroeste and San Emidigo Peak. As I started the old Audi at 4:30 AM a warning light came on – low coolant level. Back in ancient times when I learned about cars, one always filled the radiator directly with the engine running. Without actually reading the warning message on the dash, this is what I did. Turns out the newer reservoirs want the engine off when filling the car with coolant. This mistake resulted in several refills during the course of this misadventure. Moreover, I miscalculated the amount of gas I needed so when I reached the summit of Cerro Noroeste, another warning light went off.
At this point I decided to scrub San Emidigo and just enjoy this nice drive-up. It was pretty cold – 21ºF in Cuddy Valley on the way up. I broke out the winter gear and had fun making 34 contacts including 5 summit-to-summit contacts.
There was good cell coverage from Verizon on the top of this drive-up.
I limped down the mountain, free-wheeling it most of the way to save gas. This was my Audi’s last SOTA activation. I sold Pfeffernusse on December 8th to CarMax and bought an almost-new Toyota Tundra SR5 4X4 — Whitedog. I’ll miss the Audi’s great road performance and all-out fun mountain road handling, just now her low clearance.
KG6MZS 