Discussion: Reading you and Peggy...

... apparently I need to change something in my process for scanning leg lines for places where they need to be cut. Unless I completely neglected that step this time - I distinctly remember cuttting control circles but I guess I can't quite rule out that I might have skipped explicitly checking for places where leg lines obscure features. Bad course setter!

Cutting leg lines would have helped, as would the more time intensive task adding various boulders to help gauge where we were along the way. The course setting was very challenging. I was surprised that I spiked the more difficult controls and that made me happy. I certainly am out of shape and the rain/fog slowed people, but shortening the courses or further reducing climb or both, would have made it a better day for a lot. I like the terrain and challenge overall. I think we could have a successful National meet here. Peggy suggested a complementary Middle course day over at the Houck Area. We'd seen a lot of rock detail there when scouting it several years ago. Thanks for all of the work!

I like the area. It's such a good challenge!
In retrospect although I had a couple big errors, I think I actually did okay. I used my compass more than I ever do, which was good practice, and that paid off. I found most of the controls without too much trouble, which was pretty good.

I don't personally recall for sure whether the hill overlooking the lake in the Houck Area had more mappable rock, about the same, or perhaps a little less per unit area - it's not as though we laid eyes everywhere there while scouting and on the current map there aren't actually all that many boulders 1m high or higher except in the areas downhill from the few large rocky outcrops on the map (one of which it read to me as though Peggy drifted into on one leg to get the fullest sense of just how much rock there is to be added in places). But yes, I think a middle/long event would probably be feasible, though it'll take a scary amount of field checking effort to get all the rock mapped and to push the vegetation mapping from the current pretty good automatic detection of mountain laurel all the way to national meet quality.

When we ran where you mapped the previous year, the leaves were off and I was often feeling good correlation with the automatic vegetation. My memory of the Houck area was that there was a lot more rock there.