Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Horse Hill Nature Preserve, with Nancy, a fine day to be outdoors. They had originally said that getting her new tires installed might take 2-3 hours, so she looked for something we could do to kill the time, and found this permanent course. Terrible map, questionable control placements and clues (I won't call these control descriptions) like "Overlooking steep hillsides". After a false start looking for A1 during which we found that there are a lot of unmapped trails, we went B1, A1, A2*, A3, B3, A10, B8, B2. The controls turned out to be single-sided 4" things mounted thigh-high, and one of them was deteriorated to be 1"x4". We didn't find the marker at A2, even though we were confident that we were in the middle of the circle. Navigation can be pretty challenging when the map is bad, and it's a little hard to believe that doing one of these courses would get a newcomer interested in orienteering. Decent area, though, might make a good map if it were done properly, and there's a reasonable amount of parking.

Willard Brook SE, In The Dark, the shortest way around this loop, with no extra doodads. A bit more snow up in this corner of town, and some fat bike and ATV tracks. The battery on the headlamp was getting a bit low, but the quarter moon was plenty bright, throwing shadows under the hardwoods. Some stretches seemed to go on forever, and the final descent was a little lumpy.

C • forever 1

Snow dealings, round 7a: only about an inch fell, despite earlier predictions of several times that, so it took only about five minutes to blow my driveway. Swung by Nancy's house after work, but it had all melted off during the day.

C • hey 2

Lane Property, In The Dark. Another variation, same conditions as two nights ago. Most of the time I ended up following the track of a lone fat bike from earlier in the day, that had come in from the waterline trail and continued on Mystery Blazes, joining back up at the esker. I hope I'm still young enough that if I keep this up, I'll get to the point where it will be enjoyable again.

C • hope 1

Lane Property, In The Dark. Got it done. Bundled up pretty good, and wasn't quite too warm. Crunchy, crusty snow, and spikes were definitely the right choice. Encouraging bunch of footprints on the entry trail. I suspected something, which turned out to be true: there's now a bridge over the Mulpus leading to the Enigma Road, an impressively engineered one, clearly designed for snowmobile traffic. It has concrete abutments, and I wonder how much trouble they had getting that past the ConComm. It's the right thing to do, in any case. There are five more footbridges of varying sizes along the brookside trail. The place is definitely getting visitors these days, which is great, but at night, it's still my own private domain.