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| Jerry Stewart plans his next leg from Intermediate Control #6 |
Thanks to Melanie Wright and Michael Bading for helping with control pickup. It's a big mountain. It would have been a very long day without their help. And special thanks to Jeff Black for making the extra effort to find the thumb compass left behind by the meet director while setting controls.
Fifteen orienteers tackled the brush and steep slopes. There was one mishap resulting in an injury when Mike Teller slipped on the treacherous mat of Ponderosa Pine needles that covers many areas of the mountain. After a night's rest and an undisclosed quantity of medication Mike reported that he is well on his way to a full recovery. We're relieved, not as much as Mike to be sure, but still quite relieved. It can be dangerous out there on steep slopes with unstable footing, especially while dividing attention between navigation and foot placement.
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| Doug LaMott punched Advanced #4. |
Advanced Control #10 deserves a comment for two reasons. First, as far as the meet director knows, it is the only grave on any of our CTOC maps. Fred is buried there. We know this because in a remote location at the foot a cliff in the bottom of a gully there is a seven meter long 1.5 meter high stone wall supporting a terrace bearing a cut and polished stone slab engraved with Fred's name and dates of birth and death. If recollection is correct, Fred was born in 1990 and died in 2007. Some of us thought the effort and expense suggested that
Fred was a person. Others speculated that Fred was a dog. If he was a dog, he was among the most loved and honored of dogs.
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Michael Bading celebrating on his
to a second-place Advanced finish
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The second reason Control #10 is noteworthy: Anton and Sam found it. That feat of navigation is not notable in itself. All of the five orienteers who attempted the Advanced Course completed it including Control #10. What makes Anton and Sam's navigation notable is their addition of Control #10 to the Intermediate Course. After departing Intermediate Control #6 on a 100 meter leg to Control #7 they bypassed #7 by 300 meters and found Advanced #10, mistaking it for Intermediate #7. You might think that their misbegotten adventure would have resulted in a big fat DQ. However, the meet director believes they deserve extra credit for finding #10 and running a significantly longer course than Melanie Wright, who finished a miserable 17 minutes behind them in spite of her cutting the course short by following the map. Melanie, sometimes doing the right thing just doesn't pay off. Maybe someday Anton and Sam will go back out there and find #7, mitigating the grief likely to befall a meet director who so generously, loosely and perniciously "interprets" the rules.
As you read the results, please be advised that Jeff Black is the actual winner of the Advanced competition due to quality points added as a reward for finding the meet director's lost compass.
We were pleased to welcome three foreign students. It was a pleasure to meet Alexis. He's a 17-year-old French student and experienced orienteer studying at Timberline High School this academic year. Anton currently visits us from Moscow (That's Russia, not northern Idaho.). He's studying at Riverstone. We heard Russian as he and Sergey struck up a conversation. Anton tells us that orienteering in Russia sometimes has required him to scare away the wolves. The best we could give him on Sunday was a couple of deer. Samuel Gontharet, Anton's partner on the Intermediate course, is another French student joining us with the Riverstone contingent.
Sergey's winning advanced course appears below for your study and edification.
Please join us for Halloween fun presented by Melanie Schuster and Greg Davidson in the corn maze on Saturday, October 22.
John Murray
Meet Director
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