Field Day

4×4s, camping with friends, great food and wine, and amateur radio – what a great weekend. Here’s the contact map (and a link to the forum) from OAUSA’s first Field Day…

Dani finally got a chance to tinker with HF, and managed to log a few contacts herself (including Guam). She has been bugging me for new radios and equipment ever since. I’ll have to admit, while I’ve appreciated the capabilities of HAM radio for some time now, I never fully understood it’s potential for practical application until we used the repeater to co-ordinate dinner plans between 4 different groups on the road with 35-miles of mountains between us on Saturday night. Doing so was actually easier to accomplish under those conditions than it would have been with all of us sitting at home on a conference call.

While our primary purpose on the mountain this weekend was participation in ARRL’s Field Day, several groups did get out for some wheeling. On Saturday morning we headed over by Arrowhead Lake to run Willow Creek trail, a scenic route I’ve never been on before.

After Willow Creek, we continued up Dishpan Springs, a trail I haven’t seen in 10 years. The fire a few years back has left the place in a barren, almost desert-like state. The forestry service has also removed the best part of the trail, the T-6 water crossing, and replaced it with a concrete bridge and a parking lot. The first picture is pre-fire and pre-bridge back in 2001…

Despite being short a water crossing and a rock garden, Dishpan is easily twice as difficult as it was 10 years ago. About half way up the trail we ran into a six-foot-tall wall of rock where once there had been fire road (courtesy of fire damage and a harsh winter). We considered our options while watching the Jeeps tackle the newly improved “waterfall”, and bumped into a couple fellow ExPo‘ers visiting California to pick up a Flip-Pac. Ultimately, our new friends and us decided we were better off heading back to camp for chili and cornbread. Maybe next time… after I get my rock sliders installed.

Back at camp and resupplied with firewood we enjoyed a small potluck of chili, steak, cornbread, various wines, and of course… cake! I also had a chance to try out some low-light, long-exposure photography with the tiny Canon SD940is.

On Sunday a few of us ran up Gold Mountain before Dani and I headed back to the desert. It has also been torn up pretty bad since I was last here (a mere 3 weeks ago). The trail looks as if someone sat in all the difficult spots and spun their tires for a few hours, and many of the bypasses have been blocked off. Still, we all made it through and even managed to bring a stock Xterra with us unharmed.

As always, the rest of the pics are in the Flickr set…