US-4913 Hodgman State Forest

You end up in some "interesting" spots in the course of activating POTA sites. One fine Saturday found me in New Hampshire for the end-of-summer New England Amateur Radio Festival, NEAR-Fest, not far from Manchester in New Boston. You can't do a road trip to a hamfest without also throwing the rig in the car for a POTA run, am I right? I pulled up the map at POTA.app and made a short list of sites that were on my route.

Two strong prospects were Hodgman State Forest in Amherst and Silver Lake State Park in Jaffrey. I lived for several years not far from Silver Lake and knew that it'd be a nice spot, but I'd never heard of Hodgman, which I thought odd as it abuts a golf course in Amherst that I'd played many a round at. There's even a road on the north side of the park called Fairway Drive. Hodgman was the first one on the road home, and so that's where I headed after poking around the flea market at NEAR-Fest.

As best I could tell from online maps, parking was available in a cemetery that is directly adjacent to the forest. Forestview Cemetery is not a traditional graveyard. Instead there's a large 'lawn' area with numbered rows and no grave markers anywhere to be seen. The result is a large, open field that sits between the road and the forest. There are a few roads that head toward the forest, all marked 'Official Use Only', so I parked alongside one of the little roads that run around the perimeter.

From here, walk directly across the grass toward the trees up on a little rise. There's a gravel company to your left as you face the woods. The grassy area was dry when I visited, but pay attention as it looks like the sort of spot that will become a marsh in the first big rain. According to the faded and cracked NH Department of Wildlife sign at the edge of the field, the area is used by small marshy birds, and apparently this kind of arrangement with a cemetery lawn on one side and a protected area on the other is common around southern NH.

Head across the field with the road directly at your back. There might be a path or two up, but I just walked straight up the hill through the scrub.

What's on top is an odd site indeed. I think it is a rubble pile from the gravel operation next door and from material moved to construct the adjacent golf course. A geologist would tell you that it is a drumlin, left by a glacier. In either case it is only eight acres in total. They planted red pine at some point on the top, and most of it has since been harvested. What's left is a ring of enormous pine that were apparently left to provide some sort of buffer between the park and the houses that surround it, and a lot of scrub, mainly witch hazel.

I half-assed the antenna at first. Once I saw what kind of area I was in, I didn't plan to spend much time there and figured I'd just toss the dipole into a low branch and get out quick. I was making no contacts at all, one or two with poor signal reports, and so I took the time and moved the antenna to a spot around 15' up and relatively clear. It made a big difference and I reminded myself that doing it right the first time saves a lot of time in the end. I eked out a dozen FT8 contacts, half of them DX. It was a slog and when I returned home I discovered that there had been a large solar flare that flattened propagation. The nearby houses were so close that I didn't use CW, just FT8, because I hadn't brought headphones and didn't want to draw attention to myself.

I made the activation and packed up, eager to get to my next destination, Silver Lake in nearby Jaffrey. Hodgman isn't a park I will go back to, but I'm glad I did it. I'm slowly learning that there's a reason some parks have only been activated one or two times (US-11616 Canoe River comes to mind). I've been getting excited about seeing a place with just a few activations, thinking that I was just one of the first to have an opportunity, but now I'm learning that a low activation number means I need to do some additional research.

Still, it was a successful activation, and every time I go out I learn something new. Thanks to everyone who stopped by for a QSO, however brief it might have been!