Discussion: Water Gap event Memorial Day weekend

There is a possibility of using some new tenting sites at PEEC for the weekend. They have 5 wooden tent platforms with nylon tents which can each sleep 6. There would be access to showers and bathrooms in the main PEEC building. They can be reserved in two groups - two tents (up to 12 people) for $40 per night and three tents (up to 18 people) for $50 per night. If there is sufficient interest, I can reserve one or both groups. There's no electricity, but there is some sort of log cabin building for hanging out. Please get in touch with me if you're interested so I can decide whether to reserve them.

This sounds like a pretty good deal. $3-$4 per head. I presume there are no cots in the tents - just floorspace? Also, will there be bears or porcupines? I'm terrified of porcupines. Did you know they can have up to 10,000 pointy, barbed quills. Ten thousand!!
I wonder who counted them?

You only have to worry if you try to pet them; then they go away with 9,000 quills and the rest ... well, get out your pliers.

Is this a 1 day event as shown on DVOA calender?

Sounds like fun... do you know what exactly the 'special' courses are going to be yet? (If the course is going to kill me there will be no need to worry about porcupines.)

The info right here on AP, is actually the most current.

Originally conceived as just one day, at West Point I got talked into offering two sprints on Monday, May 30 to go along with brown through blue courses on Sunday, May 29 so it's now a two day affair. More details coming soon!

we have porcupines on the trails that I often run around my house... so far no quillings.

A porcupine ate some of my boot once when I was camping. It could have been an attack badger that taught him how since it was in Colorado. I'm not sure that giving them training at sprinting is wise.

Porcupines don't eat boots. Goats do. Specifically, billygoats, and especially Head Billygoats. Have things truly reached the point in Washington that government employees are mistaking Head Billygoats for porcupines? Btw, making gratuitous jokes about attack badgers is never a good idea since they can read, are easily offended, and have very long memories. If you're coming out to Colorado this summer you may therefore have to invest in some BadgerOff. It works, but it's so horribly smelly it will keep everyone else about 100m or so off of you too. Not really recommended for married (or unmarried) couples so you may be looking at some tough choices.

A goat once ate my sweater.

Porcupines eat wooden signs though. And wood siding. They used to gnaw on my great-uncle's cabin in Canada and eat the road signs that point to people's cabins. And then he would shoot them with his 22 rifle. That taught 'em.

One time I had to repair an outhouse that had been eaten by a porcupine. It chewed the plywood right off the side. They're vicious I tell ya! And talk about a compromising situation. Man. Glad I wasn't there at the time. I bet porcupines are good eatin', but plucking them must be lots of work.

I've heard that porcupines are quite tasty, and since they are not so good at sprinting, easy to catch. Ergo, the rather convincing defense mechanism. If you come up on one in the wild, chances are it will bury its head in a hole, ostrich like. Seems silly in a way, but the face apparently is the most vulnerable part.

Now spraying badger off on controls would be a particularly gnarly trick. Imagine trying to punch from 100 m away.

Porcupines do eat boots (Head Goats might eat them too for all I can tell from the last Billygoat). I could hear one crunching inside my tent vestibule near the continental divide. I scared him off w/o knowing what he was at first. He came back and kept coming back for hours. Rolling a rock at him kept him at bay but Eddie was right to be afraid. The porcupine was staring right at me when I came out in the morning. Years later another person conveyed the same experience... Once in a while when government workers are tired from escaping attack badgers in the halls they check Attack Point discussions during rare breaks. Mostly they stay late w/o compensation and don't get to train how to escape the porcupines and bears. They do have bears at Water Gap. I wouldn't try to eat one because they already know how to sprint. I think that's why Eddie sprints so well.

I'm so glad I read the last 10 or so posts in this thread. Haven't we all learned to wander of topic recently? I didn't learn much about Water Gap, but at least it's entertaining...

http://www.attackpoint.org/eventdetail.jsp?eventid...

Speaking of Water Gap, there's also a Sprint in the same vicinity (well, 50 miles South) on May 21st, the Saturday before this. Only 30 points, but we've also got a pass-everyone-chasing rerun planned (faster people start later, but only by enough so that ideally there'd be a mass punching experience halfway through the course...), cheap camping, (and perhaps some bed/floor space - email me), and a French Creek All course event (incl. Blue) the next day.

And back to the off-topic, somebody actually tried to outsprint a Black Bear at Hickory Run (northern DVOA map) about a week ago, and she got caught. Fortunately for her, she got off with only moderately deep scratches, thanks in part to her two friends who got involved in the fight, frightening the bear away. And, fortunately for us, this was also supposedly a very rare event - the reporter had to look back 20 years or so to find another nearby Bear encounter report.

I've found that porcupines don't sprint, but they do enjoy observing sporting events. There's a couple that live just beside the ski trails at Gunstock. If I am just skiing by, there's yawns and an overall air of indifference.
However, put a control nearby and they're right there by the side of the trail, perched on a snowbank, one doing the play-by-play and the other providing color commentary.

beavers are pretty proud of their teeth, 'porkies' their quills