First time activation of US-10876 Lone Tree Trail BLM Recreation Management Area. You may be wondering why there were 16 unactivated parks in Wyoming before I started doing PoTA. The simple answer is none of the unactivated parks are pleasant to reach, and many aren't particularly pretty places. The vast majority are not actually "parks" either. Many are BLM study areas (environmentalist whackos slap this designation on places to keep the land from being used for anything productive). Cloud Peak Wilderness - the first park I activated - is a spectacular national forest. After that, it is pretty much all downhill from there.
We drove over 4.5 hours to reach the "park" from our home near Hulett Wyoming. When the route you are taking crosses roads called "county road 43 1/2," you know you're in for it. Makes you wonder what they did with the other half of the road. After leaving the pavement, we traveled 7 miles on a heavily washboarded road (Cold Springs Rd) until we turned off on the two-track leading to the trailhead.
Above, we've just turned onto the two-track road. Looks good, right? Yeah, well, I swear that sign ahead said something about "abandon all hope ye who enter here..."
After 3 miles and having lost all our fillings, we've reached the parking area. When you look at 100ft pine trees on a satellite image, they look like bushes. Also, bushes look like bushes. Having high hopes that what I saw were trees, I didn't bring any supports for my vertical. In hindsight, I should have taken Wade up on his offer for a fiberglass push-up mast!
We work with what we have, so I parked next to that "tree" to the left and decided my 5/8-wave vertical wire for 20m would be horizontal. You can see the wire attached to the top of the whip drops down onto the ground in front of my SUV.
I've thrown a roll of string over the tree, and I'm about to pull the wire over to the southeast. The whip is long enough for the remote tuner on the roof to tune 20-10m, but to work 40m and 80m, I need more wire; hence the extension.
As I work on getting the radials deployed, you can see the radiating element going over the tree and out of frame to the right.
I made 8 radials that connect to the base plate on the roof (2 for 10m, 4 for 20m, and 2 for 40m).
With the antenna deployed, I start activating the park around 19:38 UTC.
Here you can see the fully deployed radials and my non-vertical-vertical.
I have only one solar panel deployed and plan to put the other on the windshield before bed to catch the morning sun. The non-vertical-vertical is seen on the left.
The ground sloped away from us in every direction except to the northeast (Big Horn Mountains). Hopefully, the slope gain made up for the bad antenna installation.
While I was playing radio, Andra deployed the tent and got our sleeping pads and sleeping bags ready.
Andra starts cooking while Dawg naps.
While eating some dinner, I took this photo of Hyattville, the closest town (population 79). Excuse my finger blocking the sun; the ag valley wouldn't be visible otherwise.
After dinner, we took a short walk to stretch before the new day started at 6pm local time.
The next morning, I got up before first light (5:30am local) and left Andra and Dawg to sleep while I tried to get some 40m contacts. Sunrise was 7:38am, but the light cloud cover prevented any solar charging until after 8am. Fortunately, my massive 2560 watt (200 amp-hour) lithium battery didn't really need it.
Once my two best friends got up, Andra started snapping a few more pictures. On the roof you can see the mag-mounted base plate with the Icom remote tuner.
Turnabout is fair play. I catch Andra reading her book on home construction while enjoying the sunrise.
Oh no! A sinkhole has swallowed the car!
For those wondering, I finished with 653 QSOs. About 300 of which were before the contest started on Friday. Getting the Kilo award will have to wait for an activation on a non-contest weekend. Once the contest began, my QSO rates dropped substantially. Once I realized how slow the contest weekend QSO rate was going to be, I decided to leave our mountain perch at around noon on Saturday. I want to thank everyone that worked me, you now have a rare "park" (cough), that will likely never be activated again. The remaining 14 unactivated "parks" will likely have to wait for next year and beyond, as the winter will soon make things much more difficult.
Before leaving I aired my tires down into the low 20s to try and keep our remaing fillings in place. Once we hit the pavement, I pulled out and restored the air pressure.
73's, Mike (AB6GS), Andra, and Dawg.