Climbing South Baldy for ARRL VHF

This is a video of my climb and discovery of South Baldy in the Magdalena Range near Socorro and Magdalena, NM. I was going mainly for the ARRL VHF contest, since the summit has line-of-sight to Albuquerque, but heard no one even after CQs on 144.200. Still, I got some receiving in, and discovered a pitfall of the FT-897 -- internal noise being picked up by itself. Atop South Baldy is a lightning research facility, where scientists provoke the turbulent skies to capture data on strikes. However, the facility seemed in disrepair, but I did notice a wire grid covering the ground for quite a large area -- that spells ground plane to me! Down the spine of the range is the Magdalena Observatory, which uses a mirror designed for use in the Hubble Space Telescope. In fact, it was one of their good mirrors...the space telescope got one of the rejects! The 2.4-meter mirror is used in all kinds of research, especially near-earth-asteroid tracking. Up a little further is the consturction site for the Visual Wavelength Inferiometer which, when completed, will provide the best view of the sky ever taken, better than the Hubble. It functions like the VLA, using several cross-correlated sources to improve signal, aka image quality. This is a SOTA peak (W5N/MG-001) and I plan to come back to activate it, as well as the other peaks of the range and area...if I ever get into shape. This climb was certainly a start!