Training Log Archive: Swampfox

Day 3, Middle distance NRE at Granite Planite. The day went about as well as I could have hoped for, with very positive feedback from the folks who were out in the sage and granite with little bits of paper in their hands. I always thought it was a cool area, and the advance propaganda efforts seems to have successfully planted that idea in the minds of those who were there.

A couple of people asked if all the rest of the days were going to be like this, and I reassured them that days 4-6 were going to be hilly, rocky, tough, and filled with unending amounts of gorse and high dryland heather with extensive poison ivy intertwinings for added interest.

Course setter for One Cowboy Relay. In order to get a valid finish result, the requirement was you had to yell: "I am a one man cowboy!", as you downloaded. As a consequence of that requirement, there were remarkably few official finishers. Tough going at Rattlesnake Hill.

Aug 29, course setter for mass start race at Light of Cheyenne, Open (mostly), fast (mostly), but nowhere near as many cows as yesterday when I was setting out controls.

I hung controls for tomorrow's O' Festival opener race. Here is one of the controls I really liked, set in some old WWI style trench dug for training way back in time, between the wars (this area of National Forest was once an Army training area):



I really did like it, but after taking this photo, I realized this control was probably going to be too easy for the race hardened, veteran crowd we are expecting tomorrow. So I decided to move it into a nearby piece of pine forest that has very deep, thick ground juniper. With spiders.

I put the control in the deepest part of the ground juniper because that's usually where the largest spiders like to hang out. Then I thought about all the other too easy controls on the course. Luckily, I was able to find some much more difficult locations for most of them, too. Too bad the maps are already printed up, with the circles all in the old locations of course, and control descriptions which are now totally wrong. I guess it will be adventure racing orienteering!

I hope the race hardened, veteran crowd will be up to the challenge.

There were rumors going around in town that an old timer prospector and his mule had just made a very exciting discovery up in the National Forest: streamers, orange, in the Twin Boulders area!

This of course created quite a land rush of folks striking out to get up there and find their own little piece of streamer, and I admit to being part of that.

Most people of course found nothing and returned home empty handed, but I had more than luck to rely on: I had an actual streamer treasure map. Which turned out to be accurate!

I returned home with armfuls of streamers and already I have made arrangements with several of the nation's top streamer firms to purchase portions of my find, though I will probably save a few of the finest streamers to add to my personal collection.