Finding My True North
The title of this article might sound like a way to align your beam antenna correctly when installing it on a tower. As appropriate as such an article would be in this publication, this one is more about finding myself, doing something outside of my comfort zone that would end up being one of the best experiences of my life, how I accomplished it and how you could, too.
Rewind to May 1990. I had just graduated from Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan with a degree in electrical engineering and was ready to start my career. A couple of my buddies who graduated with me took the time to visit nearby Isle Royale National Park (ISRO), located in Lake Superior, for several days after graduation. While I was invited to go along with them, I was absolutely broke, so I opted out of the trip, a decision I would long regret … until the summer of 2016.
Fast-forward to late 2015, when my sister-in-law asked me for some ideas for vacationing in the upper peninsula of Michigan, especially since I’d gone to college in that area. We often vacation together and they were thinking about the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. While that would be lovely by itself, I knew that the ARRL’s NPOTA (National Parks on the Air) program would be occurring all year so there could be some good opportunities to do some NPOTA activations and, if I planned it right, some SOTA (Summits on the Air) activations as well. I quickly suggested that she should check out a more unique park, one that is known as one of the least-visited national parks but the most revisited, Isle Royale National Park. After a bit of research into this, she thought that would work as moose, wolves and solitude all sounded quite intriguing. We discussed it in more detail at Christmas and it was decided that was where we would vacation in the summer of 2016, although it seemed like too much adventure for my XYL, who opted out of the trip. That was when my planning and preparations had to begin in earnest.
My investigations showed that many people hike from one end of Isle Royale to the other in about a week. I further learned that there were four SOTA summits that had direct trail access, yet only one of them had been previously activated. While I enjoy hiking and had recently discovered SOTA activities, years of
