K9OZ ham radio blog

Last Sunday was a perfect Spring day here in Arkansas, so I headed out to the woods. I went to one of my new favorites, Slattington Benchmark W5A/CS-001, in the Caddo Mountains about 90 miles west of Little Rock. This is a typical Arkansas Summit. You get there by following a Forest Service road up a pass over a range in the Ouachitas. At the pass an old Jeep trail heads up the ridge to an abandoned fire lookout tower site. The Jeep road has devolved into a brushy hiking trail, but I could see that a few other souls had made the hike this spring. It is about a 1 mile hike with 700 foot elevation gain. The first 1/2 mile is all uphill, but once you hit the ridge you are rewarded with great views. At the end of the trail is a clearing, the concrete footings of the fire tower and great views. As a bonus on the drive home I cut through the back roads and the Dogwoods were in full bloom. Another great day in the woods. Looking west from Slatington Benchmark Dogwoods in bloo...

I have a trip planned the week of April 36 to the Blue Ridge Mountains. I hope to activate 12 summits in 4 days along the Blue Ridge Parkway. I will post reports as I make progress. Day 1 and 2 Day 3 Day 3

 It's been nearly two years since the last blog post, so time to get busy again.  I did have some posts up on the Wordpress version of this blog, but since it has disappeared I'm back to the blogger version.  It's been an exciting two years.  I ramped up my SOTA activity in 2019 and had big plans to be very active in 2020 the the world turned upside down in March with the pandemic.  After a couple of months of sheltering in place, I got back out in the field again later in the year and have done many summits here in Arkansas since then.  Today I have 842 points working toward my goal of reaching Mountain Goat status at 1,000 points sometime this summer.   I'll use this blog to track the progress. My last activations was a set of four 10 pointers in western Arkansas that I did over two days.  Two were simple drive-ups and two were  hikes -- one a 1/2 mile bushwhack and one a 5 mile roundtrip hike on the Ozark Highland Trail. You can see h...