In Defense of Dupes
The Angeles Crest Highway is a remarkable bit of 1930s engineering that winds its way some one hundred kilometers along the ridge of the San Gabriel Mountains—the mountain range that rises to the north above Los Angeles—from La Cañada to Wrightwood. Much of the route traverses the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument (POTA K-4544), which was carved out of the Angeles National Forest in 2014. The choice of prepositions turns out to be important. The highway winds along the ridge, not on the ridge. On a warm-but-not-too-warm day in early July of 2022, my wife and I met up with a good friend of ours to drive the length of the highway and stopped about midway to spend a little time picnicking and activating the park. The good news is that the picnic spot we stopped at had excellent lines of sight to most of the Southern California basin, and I made enough contacts on 146.520 MHz to have logged a successful activation without even needing to power up the HF rig. The not-so-good new