Sunday, July 28, 2013 myself,
Pat WT7N, her bro Mike, and Chuck AC7QN hiked to Gobblers Knob- which is
located in Mt Rainier National Park, WA State.
There’s two ways to get to Gobblers Knob. We chose the shorter route that approaches
from the west via Forest Rd 59 instead of the longer Westside Road route. See
Washington Trails Assn’s hike info here:
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| The fire lookout hanging over the summit edge. Mr Cameraman was about 150 vertical feet below the summit. |
To save a mile hiking… we did not turn off of FR59 to head to Lake Christine. We stayed on FR-59 all the way to a rock/dirt barricade across the road where the TH is marked by a FS rules and regs kiosk. Follow the trail about 100 ft to the intersection and head right. Walk .9 miles to the intersection with the Lake Christine TR 249. Head east on TR 248 to Goat Lake.
TR 248
passes through some sweet and sour scenery. The Beljica Meadow and Lake are
unusually pretty on a nice day. The lush green marshy meadow is a heaven
for Mosquito breeding. I had hundreds of the little buggers on my arms-
like the old TV commercial for OFF bug spray. A quick swipe removes them
easily. It's important to walk fast through this area to make your own
breeze. The trail continues a couple of hundred ft elevation gain and
then loss continues through a dense tree cover to one of the sixty something
Goat Lakes (or creeks or peaks) in the State of WA. Goat Lake is very
scenic and offers nice campsites, good fishing and I was told not very many
bugs. So far we have ascended and descended with a net loss of 300 ft in
about 2.8 miles. From this point the
trail begins its approx 1300 ft ascent in 1.3 miles into the National Park and
to the summit / lookout.
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| SOTA station set up in boulder rocks just N of the lookout. |
The summit of Gobblers Knob is
not a very big area and has steep drop offs on all sides. The 14 x 14 ft lookout building covers most
of it and the remainder is festooned with odd shaped boulders. I did not want to attach my antenna to or
detract from the appearance of the lookout for visitors sake, so I climbed over
boulders to a location about 50 ft north. My 44 ft doublet was set up in
Inverted Vee fashion with the push-up mast jammed in a rocky crack. The wire ends were tied off to small trees. My two meter PVC pipe coaxial dipole was also
jammed into a crack with the D-72 at the base.
I operated my HF XCVR between two boulders and mostly out of the foot
traffic way.
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| Fish Pole in rocks to support Inverted Vee Doublet. The pipe with the white base and brown top is a vertical coax dipole 2M antenna- jammed in a crack. The 2M HT is at the base of the pipe. |
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| Thousands of photos like this one... KX3 in insulated soft lunch box with Super Heros lunch carrier with an actual lunch in it. Duck hunters insulated sit pad in lower left. |
4 QSOs were made on 2M FM, 8 CW Qs on 30M, and 2 CW Qs on 20M. I contacted the usual local hams that follow my APRS tracks, the usual chasers from around the country, and a few new chaser call signs.
Fellow ham Chuck AC7QN set up his half wave wire from the lookout railing and operated 20M SSB while I took a break and ate lunch. After he finished I went back to 20M CW to continue on with 11 CW Qs and the last Q was a SSB contact with an Indianappolis Speedway Special Event Station, “I’ll putcha in the log as a QRPer, old man”.
This trip resulted in way less equipment failures than the previous trip to Mt Defiance. My camera booted up, my KX3 did not overheat and shut off, but the APRS messages I sent to SOTA for self spotting were not received by the internet again.
I’ve been to this peak twice now and each time the view of the west side of Mt Rainier is spectacular- well worth the effort even if you don’t take radios out in the woods. Happy Trails -30- …. Rich KR7W
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| Here's the big reason to hike all this way. The W side of Mt Rainier revealing the Puyallup and Tahoma glaciers. |
