Fort Boonesborough State Park – US-1256
Activation Date – 23 September 2026
A fine mist greeted me this morning. It was welcome, to be honest, given the extremely hot temperatures the week before.
I was at Fort Boonesborough, another stop on my quest to put all 44 of Kentucky’s state parks on the air for Parks on the Air — carry a radio into a park, make at least ten contacts, and you’ve “activated” it. Most of these parks are near lakes, woods, and rivers. This one was no exception; however, it came with a fort attached.
Daniel Boone began building here in the spring of 1775 after cutting the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap. The fort I walked through is, by the way, a reconstruction near the original site.
Fort Boonesborough is famous for surviving a two-week long siege during the American Revolutionary War. I had stood on the Blue Licks battlefield (another Revolutionary War site) just two weeks before this, so the war and Boone was already on my mind. Blue Licks is where Boone, a few years after this siege, would lose both his son Israel and a battle. Boone experienced two very different endings between these two sites.
The kit was the usual — the Yaesu FT-891, a hundred watts into the CHA-25SS — and the bands matched the weather, up and down all afternoon, twenty meters fading in and out, forty holding steadier underneath. Fourteen contacts in the log before I headed off to my next park. A Wyoming park activation was the long haul of the day.
It was my first park of the day, and the quieter one. There’s a particular peace in a foggy old fort as a good day starts up .
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