Discussion: Coulson

Our club has a number of stories that get told over and over. Most are good memories but some involving Coulson are not.
Major meets can be stressful for the organizers but the NA Champs at Coulson took the cake in that regard. I don't know how much of the story became public knowledge.
We had done all the preparatory work in the usual manner, checked with land owners (private and public), got the area mapped and printed, planned courses, checked all the locations, hung ribbons , printed maps, etc. Then we revisited some of the private landowners to show off our map.
One of them couldn't believe the detail in the map and didn't want such a map ever to see the light of day. He was worried that dirt bike riders would see the trails in the area and would start racing around. He told us we couldn't use the map. He tried unsuccessfully to get the area council to stop the meet.
We redesigned the courses to make sure that his land was not used and marked it out of bounds. That didn't satisfy him. We offered to black out his land.
He then began a campaign to discredit us with the private landowners. For the two weeks leading up to the NA Champs we kept getting letters from other owners removing another small block of land from competition. Some courses were redone many times, even in the days right up to the race.

Maybe there should be some sort of accepted period, some number of years, after which it's OK to tell the old (horror) stories, and all the involved parties are too old or too dead to be offended. Because there are a lot of tales that could be told.... :-)

I can't imagine being put in the situation you were. Wow. Wouldn't have known it -- or certainly wouldn't have known the extent of it -- from the participants' point of view.

too dead to be offended

- How dead is he?"

- Well, he's pretty dead, but not so dead that he couldn't be offended...

too dead to be offended

Yeah, I liked that little phrase.... :-)

It must be past the point where they can roll over in their grave.

The interesting thing about Coulson is that the terrain (in 1986 at least) was considered better than Copeland Forest that was used for the 1994 NAOC (also hosted by HKF which is now GHO). Copeland Forest is only about 6 or 7K from Coulson. The northern part of coulson has been remapped to modern standards. I should post it soon.

Another thing about the 1986 NAOC is that after the race was over and HKF club members were sitting around a campfire completely tired from changing courses so many times one club member said "HKF should host a 5 day up in this area some time". People laughed at the thought.... then 8 years later HKF hosted a 6 day including the COC and NAOC races on back to back weekends.