Training Log Archive: Swampfox

By the time I was heading for bed last night, I had some fever, and instead of going to never-never land, I went to in-between land and started hallucinating. The problem (why I was sick) was somatamee, which meant that something had gone haywire in the system and the 3's were now 4's, and so nothing worked properly. The usual solution was to go to sleep, which, if you were lucky, would prompt they system to reset itself and all the 3's would go back to being 3's again, and you would wake up okay. But mostly it was the word somatamee endlessly repeated.

But I guess it worked, because when I woke up, the fever was gone, and I gradually felt better during the day, with only a mild headache and slight cough to mark that anything had happened at all.

Given the circumstances, I judged that it would be better to pass on any running or biking, but I did go out in the afternoon and do some mapping, and saw a yearling moose.

Ponderosas started sending off big clouds of pollen yesterday, and more of the same today. And bitterbrush has been blooming for several days. Both of these things are 2+ weeks earlier than they used to be not all that long ago.

C • Numbers 1

Felt good most of the day and for some biking, but once out in the woods and mapping, I started to sag. By the time I finished off and got back to my truck to do some running, it took a whole lot of effort to get going--what I really wanted to do was to stretch out and nap. But I ran anyway, I had stuff to get done.

Back home and in the evening, definitely not feeling well. However, if I am coming down with something, then as long as it isn't related to tick-born pestilence, virulent mosquitoes (oh, yes they're starting to appear), whisky, whiskey in bars, whisky with cowgirls, whiskey with frisky cowgirls, poison ivy (you never know), rattlesnake bite to throat, vicious elk attack, or ingestion of loco weed, I'll probably survive. Otherwise, I am doomed.

C • Laramie Super-Storm 3

Has nothing to do with anything I was doing today, but a few days ago I was looking at a map somewhere on line, and even though it looked like a good map, there was something kind of rubbish about it. I realized it was the form lines being drawn in a thinner width that full contours. That may be the new spec, but rubbish is rubbish and I'll keep my form lines the same as it ever was. Oops! Talking Heads reference! ; )

On my way out to mapping, 3 vehicles passed me going the other way, somewhat bunched together but nothing unusually so, especially as they were going up a big hill making it a tough place to pass. I didn't pay much attention, but after I went by the last vehicle--a large white pickup--I realized it was probably an official vehicle and probably Forest Service at that. It was too late to see if there was any lettering on the side, however. Then I thought back: the first vehicle had been a medium size flat bed truck, and it was hauling a vehicle with somewhat splayed tires; the second vehicle had been a regular tow truck. And I put it all together: it looked like maybe a crew had been out to take care of the abandoned sub-moron vehicle I had discovered and reported some weeks back!

Since the abandoned vehicle had been very close to where I was mapping, there was no way I wasn't going to check it out after mapping. And so I did.

I was amazed. Sure enough, the vehicle was gone, and I could hardly find any traces that anything had been there at all, which was substantially more amazing--because that spot had been filthy with debris and trash and broken auto parts, the van itself, and large amounts of broken glass everywhere. I have no idea how they cleaned it all up so well, but I do know that it could not have been easy.

I knocked off another small hill area on the map today, and even though I couldn't begin to justify it to anybody, I added on a number of too tiny bare rock dot knolls. There should be a special mapping hell for people who do this, and yet I did it anyway--definite map porn. It's going to be a pretty crummy map, but I guess it won't matter so much since it's only for an NRE and not an "A" event.

Tomorrow if I think about it, I will try to find some tiny, Finnish style cracks in the rock and map them as reentrants. That will be so much fun!!!

C • Map porn 4

Did some mapping and then ran trails at an easy pace at the end of the day. Pleasantly surprised both that I didn't feel any soreness in my legs from yesterday, and also to find there was some bounce in them. Good!

Less good: while I was mapping, a dun buggyish type vehicle zipped by, smack in the middle of the woods. Not only did it catch me by surprise, I've never seen one of these things off-road in the forest before. I hope this isn't about to become a "thing"--the newest trend. I had already noticed that whereas before it was nearly all ATVs running around on the roads up in the forest, this year I've already seen significantly more dune buggy type vehicles than ever before, maybe not up by an order of magnitude, but not far from it.

C • Dune buggy 5

Tick season officially ended on Thursday, but danged if I didn't get a gratuitous tick crawling on my wrist when I stuck my hand in some bitterbrush to retrieve a can. I may complain to the authorities or even launch a tick action suit, depending on my mood. But cows showed up yesterday, and that should mop up any lingering ticks.

Two ticks for the season is pretty bad, and I may have to rethink my tactics. Some people suggest simply staying indoors until winter resumes again in September, and it is something to consider.

Intervals after mapping, all under a perfectly cloudless sky that not even the gods could have arranged. 10 x 5 min.

Gave O' instruction followed by an orange-ish level O' course for Mark Jenkins' Gannett Expedition summer class this afternoon, all out at the humdrum yet still Remarkable Flats.

Everybody who went out came back, nobody left the confines of the map, everyone saw controls, and it seemed like everyone had a pretty good time. So another success, even though it's just a huge amount of information to throw at these folks in a very short amount of time, and a real jump straight into the deep end.

Very nice we had today's very fine weather, and not this past Sunday's very fine storms!