Older Dash at Gunstock Mountain
Brown X, Day 2 1 - along the trail, trying to find the start on the map. Thin purple lines don't work that well for me. Finally found #9 and back-tracked from there.
2. Well sure, the trail route was easy, but I tried to go straight and wandered off toward the right. A little spasm in the mid-back, probably because of the cold, but it went away after a while. Lost about 2 minutes wandering.
3. Headed straight through rocky stuff, until about 2/3 of the way I noticed there was a trail just a few steps to the right, so hustled out to it. Saw Francis Hogle coming the other way, tried to figure out where he was going since he was past the trail route to 4, but to no avail. Sure would have been better to take the trail the whole way. But easy from there, saw Tom Nolan just ahead of me at the control.
4. This was totally great, trails all the way to just past the intersection of the yellow trail and the stone wall, then up the reentrant on compass, hitting the bend in the trail part way there, and seeing it before I got there. Excellent.
5. Generally on compass, crossed the stone wall a little right of the line, saw a big cliff up ahead and went for it. Turned out it was not the one I was looking for and I was too high, confirmed by seeing the trail up behind it. So now what? I headed southwest to another big cliff, similarly not the right one, and now I'm a little panicky. So down to where I can see the big marsh, judge where the end would be, and up the reentrant to the control, where I ran into Francis again. Probably about 9 minutes lost or so. Really a bad piece of work.
6. Straight up to the trail, uphill as far as the gravel road and down the hill to the bend, across to the next ski run at the narrower part of the woods, and into the woods again, ending up a line or two to low, and running into Walter there. He was faster climbing up to it.
7. And he was a lot faster climbing down from there in the rocks. For some reason both of us went SE, instead of the much friendlier and shorter out to the west. I think he then crossed the line and plunged into the woods, as I didn't see him and I went down the ski run to the junction, angled down to the stream, and crossed it and popped out right across from the flag. Excellent.
8. Didn't want to climb out of the control (wrong!) and went back down to the ski run to the end, and then had to climb up anyway, Once I got up through the woods to the next trail, easy to see the ski runs and the strips of woods and hit it right on.
9. Easy, Stayed in the shorter grass, so ran a little more, but well worth it.