Training Log Archive: kissy

I met Valerie this morning at PWF to hang controls for tomorrow's event. It was a beautiful morning, a little crisp and beautiful sunshine. Valerie took the closer in ones because she had a time constraint, and I took the further out ones. I was going to break them in to three groups, mainly because I forgot my backpack and didn't want to carry all of those controls and boxes in a bag that I had with me that goes over your shoulder. In the end, I divided them in to two groups.

Francis had flagged the control sites last weekend, which was very helpful. I had no trouble finding the feature, but it was reassuring to also see the ribbon there.

This was the other set of controls, 5 of them. On this loop, I definitely had trouble on one control. I got in to the area, but there were a lot of reentrants and ditches, and everything was covered in greenbriar and downed trees, so it was difficult to stay on a bearing. Finally, I hit an old homestead where the vegetation should have been mapped as a field or, at the very least, rough open. But, nothing. So I ended up bailing out to a dirt road to relocate. It turned out I had stopped one reentrant system short. Argh!

My other mishap on this loop was the fact that I had to cross Quantico Creek after I had hung the last control. We've had a few days of pretty heavy rain, so the creek was very high and very fast. I found some flat, ledgey rocks to use without getting too wet. I started across and everything was fine until I slid on some slimy moss on the rocks and went down backwards, landing hard on the palm of my left hand. There is a goose egg there now, but I don't think I did any major damage. It just hurts...alot.