After a bail of heading up to McLean Hill this past Thursday a conversation started with Janelle and her parents about their Good Friday hike up to Ravens Head on Mount Yaminuska. After some thoughts on this i felt comfortable pushing from Ravens Head up to the summit to tag a 4 point SOTA activation. We planned on hiking the North side route up the chimney to Ravens Head. This allowed us to avoid the big open scree slope that has been degrading due to high traffic from 2020.

It is wandering switchback climb up to the Ridgeline, we ran into packed snow, mud and ice all the way to the chimney. Once we squeezed up into the chimney and headed the last bit to Ravens Head it became evident we could push to the summit. After a quick snack myself, Janelle and her bro Mason pushed onto the summit.

In my mind we where going be able to avoid the chains used to skirt a cliff. But I was completely wrong. We quickly gained elevation and hit the cliff, this was little sketchy due to the packed snow and ice on the small foot holds. But we took our time and pushed through very methodically to mitigate risk.

Once we got through the cliff section we started to make good time, hitting the summit at 15:00 which was going be my bail out time. I quickly fired up my 2m VHF rig to try and get some easy contacts. But it was crickets, not a soul to be found and this was a bummer as I had heard traffic on 146.520 all they way up the hike. So we quickly setup the HF rig and started to Call CQ CQ SOTA. I got a quick contact from France clear as can be, then struggled to tag 3 more contacts due to the wind picking up and making my call very noisy. But we did it, got 4 more contacts on HF from California to Arizona.

Quickly packed up and we re-traced our steps back down the Mountian allowing us to avoid the scree slope if we did the Yam circuit. We passed the chained cliff section a lot faster this time, and that was truly the crux of the day. Once past this, we made great time descending down to the truck.

Another fun and interesting hike in the rockies.

73. Until the next trip.