I created a new POTA park and activated it.
Many of us long for the days when many parks had not been activated-- ever, by anyone— and some of us wish we could have our names listed as the first person to activate a park. It wasn’t that long ago.
By Ted (W1TED)
My story about how this week, I got a new POTA park created, and then activated it. I thought the people here might be interested.
Many of us long for the days when many parks had not been activated-- ever, by anyone— and some of us wish we could have our names listed as the first person to activate a park. It wasn’t that long ago. But today, all the parks in New England have been activated at least once, except for one or two on remote islands with limited access that require special permission to land and operate.
Although I was always keeping an eye out for a new POTA-eligible park opening from the government to add to the system, I had pretty much given up on ever being the first person to activate a park. My POTA activities have focused mainly on a single park in Massachusetts, but I have been thinking about doing a small rove and which nearby parks might be fun to activate. I looked at the map on the POTA website for my favorite park, then started panning it to see what might be nearby.
I found a few Wildlife Management Areas and some State Forests, all with the familiar yellow dot indicating a valid POTA entity. But I stumbled across a State Forest with NO YELLOW DOT. I thought something must be wrong. Did the POTA site not load properly? Is the map showing an old State Forest that no longer exists?
Typing the name of the State Forest into the POTA website search turned up nothing. I did some online searching to see what I could find out. I saw some recent news from the town in which the State Forest sits that mentions the State Forest. I confirmed through online property records that the land is currently owned by the Massachusetts DCR, the department responsible for State Forests. It also appeared that this has been a State Forest since 1981. The DCR website, however, did not list this park’s name in its website.
Armed with this incomplete and somewhat conflicting information, I decided to reach out through the DCR website’s contact email. I asked about the State Forest by name and town, and if it was still an active State Forest managed by DCR. I received a friendly response within an hour. YES, it is an active State Forest managed by the DCR, and they promised to look into getting their website updated to include this State Forest.
Convinced that I had found a legitimate park that should have been a POTA entity, but was somehow missed, I reached out to the POTA mapping representative for Massachusetts, Pete Knapp, KN8PPY. I provided him with most of the evidence I had found, including the confirmatory email from DCR..
Within a day, he responded that the park, the J. Harry Rich State Forest had been added to the POTA program as US-12781. That was on Tuesday, and I just happened to have the next day off! I just hoped that no one would activate it before me. Wednesday morning, I had a great breakfast with other GSARA members and drove immediately to the park to be the first to activate it.
It is possible to set up in the park, where you can activate as a two-fer with US-8396, the Nashua River Rail Trail State Trail, which I did. That was also my first successful two-fer activation!
(Side note: a kind of cool part of activating was that one of the 126 contacts was Pete, KN8PPY, the POTA mapping coordinator, who added the park to the POTA system the day before.)