Ran the Wichita course today!
Great! Thanks for the report.
My time was 91 minutes, distance 7.84 miles according to my Garmin.
If I remember correctly, I think the route that I drew on gmap-pedometer was around 6.9 miles, and the two teams that cleared the course had GPS distances of 6.7 (route very similar to mine) and 7.2 (different).
I learned a few things about my hometown that I didn't know before.
This was the overwhelming response at the social, too! I said something similar on the radio interview, that since I was the "tourist" designing the course, I was looking for interesting things that I felt locals probably overlook or not know about at all.
At 25 the answer was 1973, as I recall, which wasn't one of the options on the answer sheet.
You are probably correct. There was a debate about this checkpoint at the social. Several people said that they read 1973, and several teams said that they read 1972. The photo I took didn't come out that well, but I thought it was a 3. But another team took a close-up of the date, and it looks decidedly like a 2, but as you zoomed out on the photo, it kinda looked like a 3 again. It's most likely 1972. In hindsight, I probably should have asked which decade, instead.
I spent several minutes carefully looking all around the metal sculpture at 36, and couldn't find a year etched into it anywhere. Is the clue wrong, or am I just blind?
It's not obvious, I'll grant you that. I really wanted to use this sculpture, but it didn't have a big plaque or anything, but I did find the artist and date on the sculpture.
Look at
this photo. You'll see that it has three large rusty legs (the smallest of which is angled upward). The name and date are etched vertically on the large leg in the background of this photo, and the etchings are facing the camera, each letter about 1/2". They are maybe 4-5 feet from the ground, about where the dark vertical line, second from the bottom, is.
And one last thing you might be interested in, Pink Socks--this has been a record-setting August in terms of rainfall, and the Arkansas River is very high.
I heard that it was the 4th wettest July ever, and that was before the last big rain of the month. I also heard that it rained for 18 days in July, which was a record!
I scouted the course on July 26th and 27th. The water was noticeably "up", but still well within the banks along the riverwalk. And then it rained a bunch on the 28th. A local adventure racing group put out some orienteering controls that weekend at Pawnee Prairie, and I went on the 28th, and I ran in the rain and couldn't cross the creek at one of the bridges because it was under water.
On the 30th, I played disc golf at Oak Park, and some of the tee boxes were under water.
Large portions of the Riverwalk sidewalks are now completely underwater. On the course, this affected controls 12 and 14.
On the day of the event, people made mention of #12 being wet and muddy, but most people were able to get close enough to see the umbrella. #14 was ok.
Something to think about if this map or course is ever used again in the rainy season.
I had people telling me that if the 'Hood Hunt were in the summer of 2012, that the routes would have been a lot shorter because you could have walked across the river without issue!