| Middle Fork Creek KY
Having suspected that I had not referred to my compass yesterday, it was time to prove my me--l(e) with some no-compass work.
Was going say: spiked 22 controls, but after looking at the splits, and seeing that I won two of those legs, I will allow restore all due benefits of spikehood to the controls in question: 15 and 19. My criticisms of the approach to these controls are, respectively, that on 15 I was overly anxious about passing above the ditch and missing the control that I hit the ditch too low (20-30m), and on 19 I took a very long route to the left. In retrospect, and seeing that I won that latter leg by over 20s, I see that my route had the advantage of having no climb whatsoever (and it would have been faster if I had dropped to the trail earlier, rather than trying to hit the control exactly from above, since I had to climb over some downed trees at the end).
Of course, no retrospective rationalization could confer spikehood on control number 22, because I never did find it. It looks like I may have encountered some green dots placed near the control, but at the time I didn't realize it. At some point, I was at the small open area under the first "2" in "22", although I didn't see that on the map at the time. Soon after that, I was off the map, and my no-compass exercise came to an abject end. My mistake was trying to use a pointy-looking spur as an attackpoint, but when I was there, the real spur turned out to be very broad, and I couldn't tell which way it was pointing. |
