Stars W.A.R. - winter adventure race
'Bent's GPS track
http://ar.attackpoint.org/sessiondata.jsp?sessioni...
Nick must spend all year thinking up clever twists for this fun ski and snowshoe navigation event. Seriously! He's probably staying up late tonight to jot down a few ideas for the next one.
'Bent and I were racing together and spent awhile yesterday planning gear options. We knew we were getting separate ski-O and snowshoe-O maps, both of them score-O style. Nick confirmed that racers could pick up controls from either map using skis or snowshoes. We had some extra gear with us depending on how the race course turned out, but our default plan was to ski with snowshoes in our backpacks so we wouldn't need to come down the escarpment to transition. We hoped to start with the ski-O map and ski to as many controls as possible, even off-trail where we could, and we'd drop our skis so we could snowshoe to controls when necessary. We wanted to front-load our race with skiing since there would be nicely broken snowshoe trails to most of the controls later on, and the snow was deep!
The race course design fit well with our tentative plan. There were several combinations of controls where the point values were doubled if we hit them in a particular sequence without hitting any other controls in between. This was a neat idea that motivated competitive teams to go back and forth on the map since they couldn't pick up all the controls in a particular section at once. Teams with less energy didn't need to bother doing that.
Only a few teams started on skis, including Mick and winter-loving Harps. 'Bent and I decided to go for some bonus points, which meant a lot of skiing early on until we'd visited 4 controls in sequence. We hooked up 'Bent for towing when we had long, flattish stretches but my skis were faster than his so I had to be careful not to crash into him! We broke trail on some marked shortcuts between main ski trails but the snow was so deep that it wasn't always faster.
Leaving from the northwest corner of the black skate trail, we were able to ski to one of the snowshoe controls, then we dropped the skis and snowshoed to two more controls before returning for our skis. (So technically, I should be logging 1 km of snowshoeing that took us 20 minutes but it doesn't seem worth it!) We decided to take another long ski to get 239 on the east side - a 50-pointer - but we probably should have descended the hill and picked up controls on the flats instead. At most, we could have scored 30 more points (less than 5% of our total) so it wasn't a big deal.
We arrived at the finish 16 seconds late, incurring a 10 point penalty in exchange for our final dash to pick up a 20-pointer.
What a fun day! So many different strategies, teams spread out all over the course, perfect winter conditions, lots of controls in different terrain. Thank you, Nick and FunRun for all your work! Great to chat with friends afterward too.
We'd missed seeing an SI punch that was hanging away from a flag, so we'd hand-punched a box on our map instead. Thus our results weren't fully automated, and we benefited from an adjustment after the awards ceremony. Final tally - 670 points, 2nd Masters, 6/22 overall. Congrats to Frankenjack and Getwaystix on blowing the field away with another win!
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B74L7H_66ec-TzBkZ0...
P.S. After telling DD11 how to lock his Ambit so the button wouldn't get bumped during races with bushwhacking, guess who forgot to do it this time. So I've got 2/3 of the race logged but I had to use 'Bent's numbers.