This was a lot of fun!
Starting 2026 off with my first hike in POTA for the "POTA Pack Mule" challenge. Thought it would be appropriate to hike into the very spot I hiked into for my first ever POTA.
Full Length Video with unedited activation:
After Action Report Video
Adapt and Overcome
The dead end road to the trailhead I planned to use has not been plowed recently. There was only a few inches of new snow on it, so I drove on... for a little ways. Then I figured might as well play it on the safer side and drive around to the trailhead at the other side of the campsite I was planning on setting up at. Why had more to the challenge by having to dig myself out of the ditch.
The Location. Back to where my POTA adventures begin.
I figured the best location to start this Pack Mule challenge would be the same place I started POTA. At a backpacking campsite in US-4350 Wisconsin's Governor Knowles State Forest. The campsite is a few miles from my house. On January 30th, 2021 it was my very first POTA.
A few months earlier I dove head first into SOTA, and at the time really didn't have too much interest in POTA. Which was a pretty strange attitude for someone who recently got hooked on portable ham radio that lives in Northern Wisconsin. The SOTA or nothing approach to portable radio may make some sense for someone from say Southern California or Colorado where there is a SOTA summit seemingly on every street corner. But not from the midwest flatlands.
Any rate that was Winter Field Day weekend and I thought what better way to tryout my first WFD than with a hiking winter campout. Since the location was in a POTA entity, that was going to be the icing on the cake. Needless to say that outing changed my outlook on several things and I was bitten by a very cold POTA bug.
So when I found out about the POTA Pack Mule Award and that it was starting in January 2026, there was only one place where I could start working on the challenge.
The hike to the campsite didn't start or go as planned, but that just added more character to the experience. No good outdoors story starts with "everything went exactly as we planned." Looking at my Garmin watch to see the distance I cover confirmed my gut feeling that the campsite appeared much sooner than I was expecting just added to the experience. 0.30 miles from the trailhead to the campsite... great. So I kept hiking down the trail to the next gate across a forest road and came back to the campsite.
I put in the extra steps, got a nice little station setup on a neglected picnic table and had a fun time. Which is the whole point of the trip.
