QOC Fountainhead West, Brown course by Vido Aleksiev, 4.7km, 190m climb nominal, though AP doesn't show me with that much climb. What a totally different map from yesterday...lots of trails, and readable contours!! Okay, so that meant courses went up and down and up and down, but I never had to pace count today.
Good routes and pace (for me) up through 5, but then I had trouble interpreting trail on the way to 6 and took a detour. Once I relocated I found the wrong reentrant/ditch and corrected to the next one over (with the help of other Oers in the vicinity). A short leg, though with contours in between, was probably doable in about 5 minutes or so but took me 11:39; 6.5 minutes lost.
I was a bit high going down the reentrant to 8 and crossed through a gully rather than to either side of it, but had no trouble finding the correct ditch (5 of the 14 controls were "top of ditch," 6 others were "top of reentrant").
At 9 I crossed the gully to the flag, which was hung on what appeared to be a dead tree trunk, about 3-4" in diameter, that had broken off its base. When I arrived it was leaning against a larger tree, but when I went to punch I knocked it down, so I took the time to stand it up again, slipping on the middy sides of the gully. Very comical.
I messed up the attack for 11, leaving the trail much too early and going down the wrong spur before figuring out what I had done and correcting. Lost about 1.5 minutes.
From 12-13, I thought I'd take the "white woods" downhill from a blob of green vertical slash and then climb late, rather than climb to the trail which wound around a couple of spurs. The lake level, however, is probably much higher than mapped, I think, and I got caught either *in* the green slash, or in some unmapped dark green (downed trees and scratchy vines) downhill from it. In any case, I managed to survive this bad route choice but got scratched up and may have touched some poison ivy trying to extricate myself. Lost 4-5 minutes on that poor choice.
I was happy to finish and find all the controls today, though I didn't do them all well.
Thanks to QOC, especially Amy and Valerie (timers
extraordinaires), the course designers, and the setters/vetters/control collectors.
Route Gadget for the day's courses. My track doesn't quite align with the trails but I did take some trails where warranted; probably should have used them for other routes as well.