Cocón de Cope

EA5/MU-162 Cocón de Cope

In 2020, I planned a nice three week trip to the Murcia - Valencia area with my new YL, but we had to cancel it due to Covid-19. This year, after we were both fully vaccinated, we decided to do a short version of this trip, limiting ourselves to the area between Murcia and Alicante. 

Finding some nice places to stay was a bit difficult, and in the end we ended up in three different spots (1-2-3 on the map below):
1. Aguilas on the 'Costa Calida' (the warm coast), 

2. Aiguës near Alicante, and finally 

3. Torre-Pacheco, which was very convenient because it is close to the Murcia-Corvera airport.

(click on the pictures to have a better view)

With only 12 days available (actually 10 days if you don't take into account the flights), I had to limit the SOTA activations to only three summits. But that was enough to get the EA5 Association on my list for the Mountain Explorer Award, and I even got a first activation of a summit. Nice !

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The first summit was EA5/MU-162 Cocón de Cope. It is near Cabo de Cope and its' lookout tower, Torre de Cope. The nearest village is Calabardina. Parking position is 37.436556, -1.484821

The area is also known for its fossile dunes, very nice to have a short visit.

This is the track we walked, you can also find it in GPX format on the Sota Mapping site, or download it via SOTLAS. Note that this summit also has a trig point (vertice) which is valid for the Spanish DVGE program, but this  point is NOT in the activation zone for SOTA. 

Like most tracks, the beginning looks easy ...

Only after about two thirds along the way to the top, it began to get steeper and steeper. 

And the final part to the summit is just finding your own way, scrambling over the rocks ...
To my surprise, I saw that somebody was already on the summit. But when we approached, they were already descending, and getting closer, I could see the young girl of the couple was wearing nothing but a string bikini, and trainer shoes ... proper mountain attire , HI !

Finally reaching the summit, I could see that it had a lot of space for antennas, so I decided to put up my "long endfed".  Now, normally I carry two pieces of random wire in my backpack, one is 9.15m long, the other is 22m. To reduce the combined weight, I did some rethinking, and made an extension to the 9.15m wire (22 - 9.15 = 12.85m), so I had less wire to carry. The end result is the same.

Proof that my new system worked is the number of QSO's : 58 in total, including some DX, and 5 S2S contacts. This was also a FIRST activation for SOTA.

I was especially pleased to work friends Gary W0MNA and Martha W0ERI from the state of Kansas, USA !

Here a view from the summit to the West, showing the DVGE vertice (VGMU-018) on the lower summit, and the bay of Calabardina in the background.

>>> Continue to the NEXT summit.