Welcome back friends! Yet another activation report - this time our target is Half Dome in Yosemite national park or as SOTA people know it W6/SN-040.

This trip almost didn’t happen. I had completely different plans for the last weekend of July 2020 but for good or for bad these plans became obsolete mid week. The best Plan B I could come up with was to curl up under a blanket and marathon the extended cut of Lord of the Rings. But. I needed a new Plan A.

If you read my previous blog posts you know I spent some time in Lassen Volcanic national park trying to activate Brokeoff mountain (W6/CN-003) and successfully activated Lassen peak (W6/CN-002). So what’s next? Well, the elefant in the room is, you guessed it, W6/CN-001 also known as Mount Shasta.

This mountain is a very special place for me. It comes with glaciers, thin air and scorching sun. It has everything you’d expect from a “real” mountain and then some. I tried to climb it in 2017 first time and had to turn back from the bottom of Misery Hill.

This experience made a great impact on me. It changed the way I see nature and my own place in it.

One of peculiarities of Lassen volcanic is that there are quite a few areas not connected internally, you have to leave the park and re-enter using other entrance.

• I’ve spend two days exploring the central area with Lassen peak - this part gets most tourist traffic.
• There is Cinder Cone / Butte lake area. The trailhead accessible from north and is close to Old Station.
• There is Juniper lake area accessible from south and is close to Chester.
• And finally there is area near Drakesbad ranch accessible from south and is close to Chester.

Planned the hike and SOTA activation of Lassen Peak (W6/CN-002) for the second day in Lassen Volcanic.

The weather was fair and spirits were high. I slept well and was ready for the highest summit in the park.

Lassen volcanic is an extremely diverse place in the geological sense. All four types of volcanoes are represented: Cinder Cone is quite unsurprisingly a Cinder Cone volcano, Prospect Peak is a Shield volcano, Brokeoff mountain is what’s left of a very large Composite volcano and, finally, our star today - Lassen Peak is a Plug Dome.

Lassen volcanic is one of my favorite US national parks. Five hour drive from San Francisco in north-easterly direction is not something lot of out of state tourists do. Yosemite and Sequoia national parks usually receive more traffic and are a bit too crowded during the peak season to my taste. The crowds are so significant that during certain stages of 2020 Coronavirus epidemic Yosemite park was closed for all but winners of Half Dome / overnight permits to avoid virus spread.

My initial plan for Independence day weekend was indeed to try winning a day use Half Dome permit. I’ve been there couple of years ago and want to repeat the feat, with a radio rig in my backpack this time. I suspect I wasn’t the only person who had a similar plan though and the lottery didn’t work out for me.