The winter bonus season might be over, but that does not need to mean that the ski season is over. We wanted a last SOTA activation on skis before switching to summer mode in our activations. Having progressed well into April on the calendar meant that we had to travel further inland and look for higher summits to find something with snow. Fortunately, LA/ST-080 Resfjellet seemed to be both high enough and far enough from the coast to be just that.
After some online research, we found two tracks up to the top: The “normal” one and the “eastside” one. They both started at the same parking lot, so we drove there while deferring the exact choice of the route up to the top.
When we got there, several things became evident immediately: 1. there was enough snow and 2. we were not alone there. In fact, Resfjellet appears to be a very popular late-season summit. One advantage of popular summits is that we could just follow the existing ski track. It had snowed the night before, but there had been several skiers that started earlier than us.
After a while, it became evident that we were on the “eastside” track. After consulting with a badass dad who was carrying his son’s snowboard on his back, we concluded that it was as good as the other path. That later turned out to be true. The path starts out relatively flat before it becomes steeper about halfway. That made the climb more tiresome, but we expected it to be a nice descent.
We finally reached the top and found it to be surprisingly warm and calm—one of the benefits of being late in the season. In honor of the 10m challenge, we first set up a 10m vertical antenna, but we did not hear anyone. Probably, the conditions were suboptimal, but it is difficult to say. If you heard us on the 10m band, please get in touch.
We then gave up the 10m band and set up a 20m vertical instead. Both are the same design, built around our usual Heathkit tuner. Here, we had considerably more success. Among others, we got Steinar’s first phone QSO. He recently joined ARK and got his callsign LB0CJ only three days after this trip.
After a while at the top, we had achieved what we came for and headed down again. Likely as the last ones for the day. Unfortunately, the sun had made layers in the snow, which made skiing down quite difficult. It became easier when we got out of the steep terrain, but it was obvious that a lot of snow had melted during the day. At one point, we had to take the skis off to pass a snow-free spot, and we had to walk around a few others.
We finally reached the car, somewhat later than expected. The whole trip had taken somewhat longer than expected, but we were quite pleased with it, and the weather had been excellent.
