Tikaboo Peak, May 21, 2008
by Gregos

I went up to Tikaboo Peak on Wednesday. It was very uneventful and hardly worth a trip report but I do have one or two things to mention. My original plan was to climb it on Wednesday and drop off some things for an overnight stay on Thursday. I didn't want to camp out alone Wednesday night so I asked my wife to book a cabin at Windmill Ridge. Cabin #5 the "Hunting Lodge" was awesome. $89 bucks may be steep, but they are VERY clean and cozy -hey, I'm not a marine, I like my comfort! Good thing too, the wind was howlin' like a Banshee that night! Anyway, I was up there for about two hours. Visibility was hazy but you could still make out the hangers with the naked eye but no signs of activity. On the way down I collected two full bags of trash. Sadly they left the trash but someone took the telescope and tripod that was up there on my last climb. It is the same tripod I have for my spotting scope and was looking forward not to humping mine up the hill on Thursday!

I headed out Thursday morning for the second climb when I noticed dark clouds and rain over the mountains. It started to rain in Alamo while I was gassing up. With visibility so bad I decided not to bother climbing. It was a good thing because the weather got worse. So instead I went to Rachel to explore a little. While there, it rained, snowed and sleeted through out the day. Cold and wet, what a bummer.

Lastly, about a month ago I purchased the SPOT personal satellite tracker. Unfortunately, I'm not that impressed with the unit. I did several hikes with it and I don't feel it performs as advertised. It takes about 20 minutes for it to register your first location and it only tracked me once in the 10 or so hikes I have done. I called customer service and it works fine while sitting flat out on the patio table. Once you clip it vertical to your belt it stops tracking. Without internet service, you don't know if your spitting out GPS coordinates or not. Now I wouldn't call it a total waste of $300 bucks. I would love to press the 911 button to see if the cavalry arrives! I imagine it would eventually connect to SAR in the event of an emergency -I hope...

Alamo Gas:
Chevron $3.88
Truck Stop $3.95
Shell $3.86


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