lumensoutdoors.org - Page 5

• Mt. Clough bushwhack from Long Pond Road - March 23, 2016

  On Sunday, Tim and I set out to do a hike. We originally planned to hike Cannon but changed our minds on the drive up to Lincoln and decided to do Moosilauke instead. At breakfast, Tim got out the map and started looking for routes we could take. While doing that, he saw Mount Clough across from Moosilauke and said that looked interesting. After a few minutes of reading trip reports, we decided it looked doable and set out to bushwhack this New Hampshire Hundred Highest peak instead.

• Nothing happening this winter - February 23, 2016

  It’s been a really lame winter so far, which means I’ve not gotten out and done much interesting, which is why I haven’t written anything. We have had very little snow this winter, and every time it does snow it is 50 and raining the next day. I’ve only gotten out for a couple of hikes (nothing spectacular) and have only gone skiing once. Unfortunately, I had planned on doing an awful lot of skiing this season including in some more unusual places so the lack of skiing has really put a damper on the posts I was hoping to make.

  For this winter, I had hoped to hike eight 4000’ers including something in Maine. I’ve met half of that goal so far. I was hoping to ski at a cross-country center four times, and I had a list of maybe ten trails and backcountry areas to check out on skis. As I mentioned, I’ve only done one day at a center and no days in the more unusual places. There’s just no cover, or it’s ice.

  I should at least post something about the January VHF radio contest, a wrap up of my 2015 hiking, and maybe a preview of what I hope to accomplish in 2016.

• 2015 Hiking Tracks - February 23, 2016

  I keep meaning to write a big retrospective of my 2015 hiking, but I just haven’t gotten around to it. Instead, here’s two caltopo maps showing most of my tracks from last year. One covers the White Mountains and one covers Southern NH. Everything before May is missing because I didn’t have a way of recording tracks, and my trip through Madison Gulf is missing because Backcountry Navigator had a bug in it.

• 2015 in radio - December 22, 2015

  At the end of 2014, I wrote down a whole bunch of goals for my main hobbies, in order to motivate myself to do them more often. Since we’re at the end of 2015 now, it’s a pretty good time to look back and see how well I did. Over the past several posts I’m going to do that, one hobby at a time. Since I’m unlikely to do anything with the radio the rest of the year, I’ll talk about that first. I’m also going to mention what I have planned for the upcoming year.

• Fall 2015 hiking roundup - December 9, 2015

  I keep meaning to write in depth about all the hiking I’ve been doing this fall, but two things stopped me. First, I wanted to be able to link to pictures but I want to set up my new photo browser (which means setting up a new server) first. Second, after a couple went by without a writeup the backlog really got big and it became much harder to get the motivation. So instead of doing anything deep here, I’m just going to give real quick recaps of what I have been up to. There’s a lot more planned for the winter so I need to knock out the reports of these to make way for more exciting posts soon.

• Hike and activation of Rose Mountain - October 31, 2015

  I didn’t have a lot of time for a hike on Saturday, because we needed to be down at David’s house in the afternoon to help with antenna raising and passing out candy. Thus I needed to find something local and quick to do. I’m also a little bored of the usual Wapack peaks, so I had to figure out somewhere new to go. For reference, I figured I might as well use the Summits On The Air maps to find somewhere a little more obscure that I could also get some radio done from. Rose Mountain in Lyndeborough fit the bill.

• My first Summits On The Air activation - October 21, 2015

  It’s fun to combine hobbies. Recently, I’d been thinking about doing more portable radio operation and with the heel injury I thought it was the perfect time to get out and take a handheld radio on a quick nearby hike to see who I could contact. Of course, there’s already an organized group that does this, and it’s called Summits On The Air, complete with spotting and awards and rules and lists of peaks. So I joined a few Facebook groups, created a couple accounts, installed SOTA Spotter on my phone, and picked my summit.

• September 2015 VHF Contest - September 23, 2015

  The weekend of September 12 & 13 was the annual September VHF radio contest, which is one of a handful of radio contests I like to participate in every year. For those who don’t know, the VHF contests take place on the ham bands of 6m, 2m, 1.25m, 70cm, and on up all the way to light. How it works is that you try to make as many contacts as you can, and you can work the same person once on every band you’ve got in common. Then, the world is divided up into these little 1 degree by 2 degree grids. Your final score is roughly the number of contacts you make multiplied by the number of unique grids you make a contact in.

• Out of action for several weeks - September 11, 2015

  I haven’t posted anything in a while, and that’s because I haven’t been doing much worth writing about. The week after climbing the Eaglet I went and did a pretty big hike up Mt. Madison via the Madison Gulf Trail with Sharon. I suppose that was worth writing about, but it’s too late now. On that hike I got some pain in my right heel. It feels like tendonitis and hasn’t gone away so I’ve been resting it ever since then.

• The Eaglet via the West Chimney (5.7) - August 7, 2015

  I’ve been wanting to take a day off work and do some really classic New Hampshire trad climbing. For a while we’d been talking about doing Weissner’s Dike on Cannon, but we decided that perhaps six pitches might be a little much for our first outing in Franconia Notch. After talking with Mike at the gym, we decided that a better trip would be the Eaglet, a free standing rock spire (perhaps the only one in New Hampshire?) by the west chimney route. This would be a three pitch adventure up a very old route.