Many thanks to Dale (N3HXZ) who shares the following guest post:

SOTA and POTA in the San Juan Islands

by Dale Ostergaard (N3HXZ)

My wife and I like to take educational tour vacations from time to time. The outfit we mostly use is Road Scholar.

The tours are geared around education and immersion in local cultures and experiences. In addition, you meet a lot of like-minded people on the tour and make new friends.  Last summer we wanted to take a vacation to the pacific northwest. We had never been there and came across a tour through the San Juan Islands. The islands are located north of Seattle and east of Vancouver. Touring the islands is made easy on a guided tour as they arrange for all transportation between islands and on land.

Washington State has an excellent network of ferries serving the island which makes for easy connections to the islands.

After we booked the vacation I began wondering if there were SOTA and POTA opportunities on the islands. I quickly looked up sites on the SOTA Goat app and the POTA website.  Low and behold there was a treasure trove of parks and summits!

Realizing the opportunity, I cross checked our itinerary with the parks and summits. The difficulty of course is that when you are on a guided tour, you have very little flexibility in the schedule, let alone transportation to go off on your own. After researching, I found 4 opportunities that included 3 parks and 1 summit. The parks were K-0061 San Juan National Historic Park, K-3223 Lime Kiln Point State Park, both on the island of San Juan, and K-3232 Moran State Park and summit W7W/RS-065 Mount Constitution on Orcas Island. The Summit lies inside the park so I had the opportunity to grab both with 1 activation. Continue reading N3HXZ: SOTA and POTA in the San Juan Islands! →