The weather was fantastic. The park has mostly deciduous trees with some young conifers in the lower elevations. Something that was really felt by everyone were the short blueberry bushes, as they really seemed to create friction and drag and tire down the run.
Peculiar thing happened: on the first half of the run, found a control that was of the second half (228) and punched the box in the control card that was meant for another control nearby (208). Then, on the visible horizon inside the woods, saw a darting red and white DVOA shirt of another participants, followed that, and found another control (208) and punched box 9 without thinking much about it (box 9 should have been for control E, found much later...). Then, a minute or two later, as I was looking at the map, I noticed there was no circled control 9, and at that time, I thought that maybe the drawer forgot to draw a circle for it, and kept going. After I got into the EFGHI box, and did it in sequence FGIHE, once I got to control E, I noticed it was already punched (box 9). That really took me on a spin, not sure what happened, how it happened, did I mess up, did I miss a control, where did I mispunch. Punched again on the side of box 9 with the punch of control E. Must have pondered it for about two minutes, before I decided it was OK to keep going and get to the finish for the map exchange. It would be only a couple of days later that I would evenutally solve this mistery, after verifying the punch holes on my control card (they let us keep the cards, they trusted us on our word when we said we visited all controls) and noticing that box 8 and 28 had the same hole punch. And to add to it all, these two controls that were near each other, have also similar control numbers, "208", "228". Nice.
At the finish of the first half, grabbed the map of the second half, ate an apple on the downhill run, and went to control K first. After that, went to control M where I saw Vadim and Nadim (hey, their names rhyme...) punching, but after that they were off to conrol 18, having finished visiting all the controls in that window. After M, I went to J and L (what I should have done, after K, is follow trail to J, the trail has a nice catching feature by ending in a T instersection with a bigger trail nearby, then follow that bigger trail to get to L, and then to M).
On the approach from 20 to the NOPQRS window I made a stupid mistake of following a NW trail instead of the other NNW trail. Once i got to the stream and trail intersection, I realized I was nowhere were I wanted to be, and eventually corrected, but it costed me valuable minutes.
Navigationally, control 27 was the hardest. A terrace with not much other references nearby. Control 19 was also difficult, but at least there was a open clearing not too far to provide some reference.
Another mistake was when looking for control I, I searched too much on the North-East area of the control and eventually hit the trail. There was a hunter on a parked ATV, with some orange clothing on it, and went for it thinking it was the control. The hunter saw me running towards him at full speed, I bet he wondered what the heck I was doing. Eventually I used the trail bend to directionalize me towards the correct location of where control I was.
After the event, we ate bananas, cookies, pretzels. The weather was still very nice. We looked at a pond nearby, a nice control location I could have photographed if I remembered to bring my camera was control Q, on the eastern side of a boulder. It would have made a nice control and mapping feature photo.
We stopped at the King's Gap General Store on Pine Street, talked to a couple of old timers, explored their antique display in the shop's basement. Definitely a treasure trove of old Americana.
maps borrowed from Sandy
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