Mt Tom control picking exercise. Set up by Ali and Alex as part of a training day, but this was enough training for me. I had a lot of difficulty with it, both physically and navigationally. It started to rain toward the end and I got very cold and couldn't see, so the next activity, the corridor, just wasn't much fun anymore and I headed in.
Gave PG about a 30 second head start which was plenty. He was gone quickly. I got passed quickly also by Hannah just after #1. Ali's friend Eric caught up between 1 and 2 and I saw a lot of him after that. He was generally faster, but we seemed to take different routes and meet up at controls. In addition to everything else, for some reason I wasn't seeing the streamers. Perfectly good pink streamers but there were several I stood next to for a while before picking them up. I had the worst time trying to find #8. Back and forth on the trail trying to make sense of it, fooled by the rather robust stream that is not mapped, and finally on top of the cliff with the control and a devil of a time getting down from it. Leaving there was no better, drifting way off to the north to a streamer on an unmapped boulder, then going by #9 and feeling perplexed at the trail, since I was expecting to be at 10 already. Gail bailed me out. After that I was generally finding them, although I had to go relocate to find 19, even though I had been standing on the dot knoll earlier and hadn't seen the streamer.
My
route.
Then I walked and jogged along a bit of the corridor route, but too cold and too blind. Back along the road.