Summit One

Most years, the first Saturday in October is the Ten Point Madness SOTA event for W7A (Arizona). Operators head out across the state to get on top of a 10-point summit where they’ll rack up a ton of simplex S2S contacts with each other before getting onto HF to chat with chasers further out.

The summit I picked was Browns Peak W7A/AW-014. This is one of the Four Peaks that rise up in the sky west of Phoenix. Everyone knows of Four Peaks, in fact, my favorite brewery is Four Peaks. While working at the local rock climbing gym in college,noften after we closed up, we’d scale the wall behind the gym (of course we slyly installed holds) and would hit up Four Peaks for a couple of pints and a flat bread. We’d talk about past and upcoming adventures, sharing beta and dreaming up new challenges.

Crazy enough, in all my years of Arizona exploration I never went up to see the peaks I was otherwise so familiar with. Better late than never.

The alarm went off at 1:30am Saturday morning and I was out the door by 2:00. The time to be on the summit was 14:00 zulu, or 7:00am local. Driving was going to take a couple of hours and the hike, although a short three-ish miles, included a pretty decent class 3-4 scramble.

Starting a hike by headlamp is generally a sign of a solid day ahead. It was dead quiet out there except for the one largish animal I woke up (I couldn’t ID what it was) and the whispers I heard at one point, which still gives me goosebumps as I think about it. The mind can play some wicked tricks.

As daylight began to creep on the horizon, I got to what is referred to as “the chute”. This was the scramble section and it appeared proper sketchy at 5:30am. But as usual, the closer I got to the rock the less scary it was.

Three hundred sixty degree views at the top were incredible and I couldn’t have been more stoked to be back in the desert. Unfolding my three-element yagi antenna and affixing it in a bush pointed north-west, my HT radio was on and I sat admiring the landscape and monitoring the airwaves. Just after 7:00, 144.41 became alive with summit to summit calls. I waited for bit to let the locals have their fun (I felt a bit like the foreigner) and once things slowed a bit I clicked my pen and jumped in the fray.

When all was over, I had 29 QSOs with 16 of those being on VHF. That includes an 89.2 mile summit-to-summit on 2m simplex with Fred N7PN. Pretty rad.

Summit Two

After hustling online earlier in the week, Wednesday was opening up work-wise so I took the opportunity bag another a local one. The highest point in Maricopa County seemed like good option, so out to Lost Dutchman State Park I went. The trail is more commonly used to reach “the flatiron”, which I had done a couple of decades before, but today I was aiming a bit higher.

Route-finding, even with my GPS map, was interestingly difficult. I wandered off-trail once or twice and would have to make my way back over. Lots of rock hopping and all of it was steep. The couple of times I stopped for a breather were cut short by swarms of mosquitos.

At the saddle you can make your way over to climber’s right for the flatiron viewpoint, or go left to scramble up some more in order to gain the high point of Superstition Peak W7A/PN-022.

Summit Three

This was an early morning, headlamp trailrun in an attempt to bag a summit (Goat Hill W7A/MS-065) before logging onto the computer for the remote workday. A “revenge activation” so-to-speak. Goat Hill was my first-ever SOTA attempt back in April 2024 when I was a Technician with exactly zero personal QSOs outside of a repeater contact or two.

This time, I had the tools and I had the talent (to quote Winston Zeddemore). Success came easy this time with a quick run of 2m contacts. Because I brought my KX2 along, I figured I’d might as well give it whirl so I did a super rudimentary antenna setup (tossed my wire down over the cliff edge) and got one QSO from W0MNA.

Good enuff. Over and out.