Wow, what a great day. The Needles is an impressive rocky outcrop off the side of the road to Strathgordon in the Tasmanian Southwest National Park. I’d looked at it on the map and read a few walk notes but dismissed it as a bit hard for me to do. That’s where Jim VK7JDZ comes into the story. Jim posted in our club Discord that he was looking for someone to join him on Sunday. I thought long and hard as I didn’t want to hold anyone else up if I struggled with the climb but this was also a great opportunity to get to know Jim and do the climb safely with another person. I said yes.
I left home at 7:30am, grabbed a Maccas coffee, and headed to Jims place in Hobart’s northern suburbs. There was a quick chat about gear where I luckily suggested we both bring gators and we headed off on the roughly two hour drive to the beginning of the track at the sign proudly proclaiming to be the highest point on the Gordon River Road. Google maps incorrectly has the trail starting way back down the road, I submitted an edit to try to get that fixed.
The track starts off muddy and flat then climbs steeply until a saddle is reached. The track has become a creek so it alternates between mud and rock. I found my walking pole a huge help. Half way to the saddle there was an amazing view of low cloud hanging around in the valley below.
The rocky outcrops along the way were stunning. Once the saddle was reached there was a bit of a rest before the really steep climb to the summit.
Having carried both sets of radio gear up the 90 minute walk to the summit we decided to only use Jim’s since he wanted to try out his newly build linked dipole antenna. We set up right on the summit with me being overly cautious to ensure we didn’t knock down the cairn of rocks, put out a spot, and started to call CQ SOTA.
A successful activation with 14 in the log, 6 VK7’s and 3 ZL’s.
VK7ID 