Global warming has once again brought gawgeous fall weather to the Maryland area. Saturday was for yard work and Saturday night was for seeing the "pretend George Clooney and Beau Bridges are Hawaiian" movie, "Descendants." Eh - not a bad movie, but not a great movie. The dual premises of George Clooney's wife cheating on him with a schlemiel, and Clooney being the heir to the King Kamehameha fortune are a bit hard to swallow. But I have to say: I admire the cujones it took for them to put out a movie where one of the leading characters is continually shown dying realistically (but slowly) in a hospital bed on life support...
Sunday Carl and I did another radio nerd hike - a Summit on the Air radio/hiking extragavaganza. This time we hiked up the Appalachian Trail from Smithburg to Mt. Quirack, often called High Point (for reasons that will soon become apparent). The start is about a 700 foot climb straight up, passing a nice waterfall along the way. The temperature had been in the high 30s when we started but between the sun coming up higher in the sky and the exertion of the climb, we were plenty toasty.
After the initial climb, you reach the junction for the Raven Rocks shelter, a .1 mile detour off the AT. We decided to take a look and it is impressive - nice picnic tables, loft area for sleeping, outdoor fire pit, composting latrine, valet parking, etc. We were very tempted to just set up the radio gear here but that wouldn't have been kosher since we weren't at the actual summit. So, on we hiked and Carl told me all about the shortcomings of his Kindle, the complete history of the TV show "The Good Wife" and his adventures making a cranberry pie. Turns out slicing a bag full of cranberries in half is a pain in the ass, and boiling them up makes better glue than pie filling.
We reached the summit at High Point, which used to be a hang gliding launch platform but in recent years has been taken over by graffiti artists who aren't good enough to show their stuff on city buildings - these guys are definitely not in the league of Banksy. We admired the view and soon got to work finding a place to string up the antenna. There really wasn't a very good clearing so my first shot with the slingshot resulted in me getting the weight stuck in the wrong tree, so we went back to pipe elbow mode - we quickly had the 20 meter dipole up a whopping 20 feet in the air, in the middle of branches.
Now, in our previous adventure we had only hiked .5 miles to the operating site, and Carl was able to carry his portable Barcalounger. Since this was a 3.5 mile uphill hike, Carl had to use my portable three legged camping "stool" which is really more like a bicycle seat on a folding tripod. I find it very stable but I'm used to kayaking. Carl settled down very tentatively and started screaming he was falling and would roll down the hill and off the cliff. He finally got settled in and worked stations in Canada, New England, Oregon, Virginia and many other places.
Carl sloooowly and creakily got up after a while and I took a turn operating, and worked stations in Belgium, the Czech Republic and elsewhere. It was starting to get cold, so we broke down the setup, packed everything up and hiked back down the mountain. On the drive back we listened to the Washington Redskins find yet another way to lose - ah, the rituals of Autumn...
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