Most of the long Fake JWOC course at Townsend. I had the advantage of having put out the streamers a month or two ago. I had the disadvantage of having taken the path of least resistance to print out the map, resulting in a 1:15000 version plus a 1:10000 version of
most of the map, both inkjet prints on not particularly great paper, and of the ooriginal version of the course before I moved a few locations. I mucked up #4 pretty good (on the hard to read 1:15000 part) and then screwed up the exit from #5, hitting the trail in a different place than I expected, so I turned the wrong way, but I recovered okay. Then the heart of the course went fine, very enjoyable in the nice woods up north. A little trouble on #11. Eventually it got to be a race between whether I would run out of daylight, watch battery, interest, or controls first. After #15 they were all getting to be in short supply, but daylight won out: in the vicinity of #16, I just couldn't read the map well enough to figure out where to look for the streamer (and I didn't remember that location at all. Kind of funny that my exit from there was along the exact same line as when I was leaving #5. I had no idea at the time that I was in the same place. Then after going around the pond, I looked at what was left, decided it wasn't that interesting, and called it a day.
Feeling pretty tired when I packed it in, and thinking that I'm not in as good shape as I had been hoping, because I took over two hours to not even finish a 9.7 km course. But the GPS shows me as having gone almost 12.5 km. Something is fishy here, and I did better than I thought.
But... one of the best AOWN moments. At #4, I heard a noise and turned around to see where it was coming from. I was expecting to see maybe a porcupine, maybe a raccoon, but about 8 feet up in the small tree next to me was a fisher, trying to figure out what it should do. I've definitely never seen one that close up. It looked so cuddly (hah!).
splits