SOTA Mountain Goat Achieved! 13

Achieving SOTA Mountain Goat on Skiddaw (G/LD-004)

After six years of trying to climb everything within my reach, I’ve finally done it. I achieved SOTA Mountain Goat status.

In September we visited the Lake District for a holiday (before lockdown 2) and as usual did a lot of walking up to the various peaks in this region. I had four days to activate the 6 summits needed to make Mountain Goat in 2020. It’s not been a great year for SOTA, due to the COVID-19 lockdown across the world, but here I had a small window of possibility.

Driving up to Lake District I had 941 activator points, so me and my wife knew we’d have a lot of walking and multi-day summits to get the remaining 59 points and tip the scales in my favor. But, after reviewing some walking routes passing multiple summits in a day, we worked out it was possible, but still a good challenge.

Here’s my activator log over 5 days (including 1 rest day – enforced, very strong winds and rain!):

As you can see my final summit was Skiddaw (G/LD-004, 10 points, 931m), the conditions were predictably awful (it usually is up there!), but it was a fun activation, with plenty of chasers calling in to congratulate me passing the milestone.

Here are some statistics about my road to mountain goat:

• 6 years taken
• 243 SOTA activations
• 143 unique SOTA summits activated
• 3,504 QSOs (thanks to the many chasers!)
• Summits activated in:
  • 6 countries
  • 10 SOTA associations
  • 3 continents

SOTA Mountain Goat trophy – hand carved in the Scottish Highlands!

I’ve had a lot of fun with SOTA over the past few years, it’s taken me to some crazy places which I wouldn’t have otherwise visited and has seen me operate in some conditions where you start to really question your sanity.

So what next? I don’t plan on stopping SOTA just because I’ve achieved Mountain Goat, there’s still so many summits left to activate. Some initial ideas include:

• Achieve 1,000 activator points using VHF alone
• Achieve 1,000 activator points through unique summits alone
• Achieve 1,000 chaser points to get my Shack Sloth award (222 points to go)
• Activate all English SOTA summits

Thanks to all the blog readers who have followed my SOTA (mis)adventures over the years and supported my endeavors. I do intend to continue blogging about the more interesting activations, so stay tuned!

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