OK, so it seems that I jumped into this SOTA thing a little too quickly and made a couple of mistakes. Thankfully, there are several people who have contacted me with some great advice for getting on track to doing things right. Hopefully I will have better luck going forward.
One very helpful tip I would like to point out is a reference to the 2015 July/August W7O newsletter, which has some great tips on 2M Activations. Thanks Etienne (K7ATN)! The other crtitical tip is that Activations can only happen on simplex frequencies so nothing I have done so far counts. C'est la vie!
And now on to my (non)Activation report:
The trip went pretty much to plan. Our group left the Phelps Creek TH at 7 am and made it to the summit of Carne Mountain at 9. It was cold and windy on the summit and everyone left me there to attempt my Activation. Of all the repeaters on my list I was only barely able to reach the Kittitas County repeater 147.360. I was not able to clearly hear anyone but it gave me hope for Mt Maude, which is a full 2000 feet higher.
As most of you probably know, it is larch season and the larches were going nuts up there. Carne Basin was a sea of yellow larches and the route to Mt Maude was either dotted or swathed in larch yellow or blueberry red.
By the time we made it to the summit of Maude the sun was out in full force and gone was the wind that chilled us to our bones on Carne. As I had hoped I was able to make some decent contact on 147.360. Unfortunately, the person I talked with said his call sign too quickly and I was not able to fully record it. Oh well - it seems it does not matter since it was a repeater! :) However, I now know that if I reach someone on a repeater I can simply ask them to move to 146.52.
Thanks again to all who reached out - I look forward to Activating with some of you in the future! Also, if anyone has any words of advice on a whip or a yaggi that is light/compact enough for back country travel I would love to hear from you!
73, Rich/KG6NOX
