Ralph (VE7OM) and Eric (VA7NX) climbed two local summits on Saturday to try and activate two summits on the same day. First on the list was Mt. Agassiz near the twon of Harrison Hot Springs. This hike has no marked trail and one must pick their way through the trees to find the summit. Though fairly short there are a number of steep sections leading to the summit. The operating position is just south of the summit where the ridge opens on a cliff face and one can operate with a view of the Fraser Valley below. Eric set up his 2m yagi and with Ralph's 30 watt amp with his Handheld and was able to just pull in 4 contacts.One station VA7CQ in Vancouver had his 11 element beam pointed back and we had a good conversation. Meanwhile Ralph had is small dipole strung up between trees and using his KX1 in CW was busy making east coast contacts. Once we had exhausted our immediate contact pool we tore down the stations and started back along the path for the truck.

Once back at the truck we ate some lunch and drove to the place we were going to hike to the summit of Mt. Woodside. The drive up was through a narrow road with alder pushing in from both sides. We got to the end of the road where there is an old decommissioned Telus repeater. Here we parked and started for the next summit. This path was new to us and we made a couple of false starts before finding a workable route to the summit. Once on site Eric quickly assembled his yagi and put out some calls, he contacts 6 this time two were repeats from earlier including VA&CQ and his big beam. Ralph had more trouble finding a support for his antenna on this summit as the trees were not tall where we were and so he had to use the small mast he brought with him as a centre support. Despite leaning over quite aways and not raising the antenna high, Ralph made 21 contacts with his few watts including stations in Quebec and Florida. It was his personal best for a SOTA activation. Once we had gotten enough contacts we packed up and started back down the cliffs to the truck. We felt the day was a success but we were now well tired and not wanting to do a third summit.