Week 25 – Part 1 – Bunches Bald (#54)

It was April 2nd.  Several have just activated Bunches Bald W4C/WM-013, and among them K2JB on March 30, and Tom W1PTS on March 31, to get the last winter bonus points.   I followed Dean’s directions to the letter.   I entered from the Blue Ridge Parkway at the entrance near Big Witch Gap and drove the 3 miles to the campsites near the summit.   Dean pointed out that behind campsite T4, there is a faint trail that leads to the summit.   I got to campsite T4 and found that the site itself, although very nice for setting up a station, is below the AZ by a couple of meters.   As soon as I jumped onto the trail, I was in the AZ.   A walked another 30m and with that steep trail, I was well into the AZ.

Setting up a radio station was tight but very doable. Soon I was on the air.   Propagation was not good as I was getting a lot of weak signal reports.   I could not hear any other summit activators – although folks were calling on K9PM.   I made about 20 contacts with chasers on 4 bands.  Soon I was packing up to go home.   On the way down, I found an alternate approach without bringing the vehicle into the campground.   It would involve a 1 km hike with 200m of elevation gain which is very doable.   There was a large grassy clearing on the shoulder of the Blue Ridge Parkway past the Lickstone Overlook if one is coming from Soco at coordinates  N35 degrees 31.114 minutes and W83 degrees 11.698 minutes which will bring you to within 40m of the dirt road.   One would just walk over the 40m from the grassy area to the dirt road and hike the rest of the way.

While planning the logistics for activating Bunches Bald and setting up my alert on the SOTA reflector, I found several alerts for Tom W1PTS.  It appeared he was planning activations on April 3 and April 4 which will get him to within 2 points of becoming a Mountain Goat.   Stay tuned to see how this played out. The projection was that Tom would just miss setting the North American record for the shortest time to become a Mountain Goat – in the neighborhood of 10.9 months.   The NA record is still held by WA7JTM of 10.75 months established in February 2014.  There I was at week 25 with 585 points – 27 weeks to go, and 415 points to 1000.