Friday after work, SB and I drove up to WV for the Winter Wildcat. We had secured a room at the Yamagata Lodge, which is really convenient. You can check in, get a good night's rest, have breakfast, do the event, and easily jump in the shower right afterwards before dinner and doing it all over again.
This would be our third year doing the event. It's so well done. Mark Lattanzi is the godfather of land nav in the US, it seems. The Summit Bechtel Scout Camp is an amazing venue, between the unique terrain of the cliffs formed from mining operations and the cool scout activity areas that are everywhere. It's a vast area that we only get to see about half of every year based on the amount of ground we manage to cover, and it's pretty much empty apart from all of us event-goers, making it feel like a wild and otherworldly adventure.
This year, we were encouraged to bring microspikes. We've done snowy and rainy weather in the past, but because of the snow, melt, and re-freeze, spikes would be very helpful this year, especially when you mix slopes with ice. Mark had also adjusted the placement of the controls in response to the icy conditions, bringing them in a bit closer to HQ. All of these precautions meant that we would be in for some legit challenges!
We were told that this would be the last year of the event for at least another 2 years, and that Mark would be looking at other venues for the future, so it might be our last chance to enjoy this great place. I wasn't going to miss it!
DAY 1
Pre-Race
We got breakfast at 6:15am. Maps were distributed at 7am, which gave us an hour to plan and get ready to step off for the 8am start.
This year, there were only 2 maps instead of 3, at a 1:15,000 scale. As a different twist this year, certain controls (ones marked in red) could only be obtained on Saturday. We therefore decided to put more weight on getting those Saturday while we still had the chance, to give ourselves more options on what to go after on Sunday. Those Saturday-only points were all on the Eastern side of the property, which also happened to be the one area we had not explored before. Our first year, we went South to explore the cliffs on Saturday, and we hit the point-rich Northern area on Sunday. Our second year, we went to the Southeast on Saturday and went North on Sunday. Wanting a chance to experience everything and also maximize Saturday-only points, we chose to go to the Northeast this year.
We had a plan for how we'd start mapped out, and then the rest we'd play by ear depending on time. The Northeast was where the drawing-O was located this year, and that was really fun to try last year, so I was glad to potentially have a chance to do that again. With the drawing-O, before the race starts each day, you get about 10 minutes to draw your own version of the map, from the official one that is projected onto the screen. Other special twists offered this year were the Memory-O (memorize the map and go off of memory), the standard O (10 controls with smaller flags), and the blank map section (dead reckoning pretty much). As another twist this year, you could only do one per day, between Memory-O and Normal-O. I do enjoy all of the opportunities to make strategic decisions about how to maximize points and approach the course.
We were at a table in the main meeting/dining hall with another all-female team from our same part of the country, which was fun. They were also doing mapwork and making their plans. It's fun to see team dynamics at work. It's intriguing. Every team is different, but it's funny to see different archetypes of people playing their roles as a commonality across teams of all sorts. They were nice and seemed like they knew what they were doing.
Northeast
We stepped off on what we joking call our "usual" way down Yamagata Lodge mountain. It's funny because by day 2 of our first time at Winter Wildcat, we were calling it that. Getting down to the main road was easy, but we and a number of other teams had to do a bit of hunting to find the "standing hollow tree 20 feet tall" for the first point (CP52), even though it was pretty open land, just on a big slope down from the road.
Next, we went along trails to get CP91, whose clue was "Mystery". It was actually on a bridge. Last year, a number of clues had the word "Mystery" in them, and the first team to figure out what the Mystery meant and go back up to Yamagata to tell Mark got an extra prize. He didn't mention that extra game this year, but it actually did end up being a thing. It was odd that this was worth 91 points, since it was an easy grab, and points are based on the 10s digit of the CP#. Looking back, this year's point scheme seems a little bit more randomized as opposed to being related to the difficulty of the point. Even so, it still gives you opportunities to strategize about which ones you go after.
We then started venturing off-trail. We went uphill towards a fenced off-limits area to find CP62 at "boulder, 2m, south side of spur". We then handrailed the fence until we found a spur that was a good attack point for an on-the-fly decision to go for CP102. That CP did require going downhill, then back uphill to get back on the original course, but it was worth many points, and it wasn't super far off course. There were some cliffs to work around, but we managed to find it at "large ditch upper end". We ran into our friend from NCARS while we were going after the point. He is a RD and a really good racer and navigator. It's always reassuring to run into a good navigator on-course because you know you're on the right track and that you've picked a good approach to the point.
At some point bushwhacking down through the rhodo, I ended up losing one of my microspikes. There was no point in trying to look for it, since we had bushwhacked to get down here. The steep slopes would work to twist the rubber grips off of my shoe. It was unlikely that we'd come back up exactly the same way we went down, too, since it was all just directional bushwhacking.
We got back up to the fence and took a road up to attack CP55 at "briar hilltop". Our original plan of attack seemed to be straight up a super steep and unclimbable slope. I was surprised that it wasn't marked as a cliff on the map. We went a little further north and found a somewhat more approachable route up. There were indeed briars. Going down hills with only one shoe with spikes did make walking more tricky. I'm sure I had an uneven gait. Looking back, I probably should've moved the spikes to the other foot halfway through each day or something, to even things out. Fortunately, no big disasters from slipping or anything. I just had to be really careful when stepping with the non-spiked foot.
While we were walking along on the trails, it was fun to come across animal tracks throughout the weekend. We saw maybe geese tracks, small bears, and big bears. Probably deer, too. We also saw a big pile of bear poop.
We went along a path to an intersection where we got CP60 at a "triple rootstock". Navigation had been super smooth so far. Things were rolling.
That ended with CP61... a right turnoff for a path that we were looking for never came. We had been good about pace counting the whole time, as a back-up method of tracking location to supplement landmarks and terrain. We surely didn't see any turn-offs, so we turned back. We went all the way back to a stream and attacked from the stream instead. We wandered around for a while... knowing where to cut away from the stream and into the woods wasn't as obvious when we were going off of a pace count from the end of the stream that intersected with the trail. We ended up back at the head of the stream, when SB saw what could be considered a trail... the trailhead wasn't visible from the main path, so no wonder we hadn't seen it. It was also pretty close to the stream. We followed it. There were more paths later on, not mapped. I followed that and eventually found the CP. That took a lot of time. When we had first attacked along the stream, we hadn't gone far enough.
After a challenging point like that, it's good to get a win, which we did when we found CP40, "depression in a depression", which is a fun clue. We had gone up the hill, and there was a wall around a circle, and we could go in, which seemed correct directionally. The inner depression wasn't immediately visible since it was on lower ground, but when you got closer, you could see it.
From there, we chose to go east to CP50, on our way towards the drawing-O. It looked a bit tricky on the map, since it was all off-road, but we crossed the stream and found a good steep area where we saw the point at the "top of rocky outcropping". We were pretty proud of ourselves for finding it in the middle of nowhere.
We continued east towards a trail. We took the trail north, to go for CP80 of the drawing-O first. We had trouble finding the eastern turn of the trail, and we weren't the only ones, since we ran into 2 solo guys who were also having trouble finding the turn. One of them had gone one way that we had considered going at a trail fork, decided that it wasn't right, and had already come back. The trails didn't seem to quite match the map here. These guys had been in this area at previous events and knew it better, and they figured out a way to go, and that seemed right. They were moving faster than us.
We cut in to the unmapped area, down a slope, able to follow footsteps for the first part in the snow. We found point 80. My plan to attack CP81 was to go 100yd south from there, then go due east. There were trails along the way that were not on the map. The map had some defined highly vegetated areas. I though that this would be obvious in real life. We passed one vegetated area on our left, decided that it came too early and that we should continue east, and saw another on the right, up slopes. We were following a path that we hoped would curve around the vegetation to get us to the point on the south eastern side of the vegetation where the point would be. We continued on the path and kept looking for the point but never saw it... only steep cliffs up that you wouldn't want to climb, especially for no good reason.
(We're team #208)
We continued on the path for a long time. We had given up on CP81 by then, but hopefully, the path would at least take us south to CP82, which was a logical next point to attack. The trail suddenly ended, so we had to drop a bunch of elevation to get down to another path. We followed that, with the river to our left and cliffs to our right, looking for the power lines. We did see the power lines, which helped us know where we were, but there was no way to attack CP82 from there, since it went straight up densely vegetated cliffs. We had no choice but to continue south and look for a trail that would take us back to the west. We had walked a long way south, it felt like. We were stuck on this side of the cliffs. Turning back was technically an option, but apart from the distance (and the lack of new points to grab retracing steps), there was also that segment where we had dropped a bunch of elevation to go from the trail that had ended, to the lower trail, that we'd have to gain back. It had been really, really steep, too.
We grabbed the point and made a plan to get CP94 back on our way to a mapped trail. We had gone from wondering if we'd make it back to the finish in time for the 10-hr mark, to knowing where we were again.
We went up to get CP84 at "roostock", and then we went south and back north on "safe" but longer trails to get CP90. We thought about whether we wanted to go south from there to get a series of CP32, CP42, CP43 on our way back west, but they weren't the easiest points with lots of cliffs and vegetation in the middle of nowhere, and they weren't even worth that many points, so we instead somewhat retraced our steps to go back towards the lodge.
We did have time to go after CP92 "top of 3m cliff/boulder" and still grab CP103 "rootstock in creek" and then CP63 "roadside cliff band, north end". We got those so quickly.
We even had time to grab a Memory-O point before finishing. After all the "adventure" from the day, SB wasn't going to do any more than that, but I'm glad we got at least the one. The turn-off for it took a little bit of searching, but we got it once we found the path down.
It was good that we went after 92/103/63 instead of saving more time for Memory-O, since those were worth a bunch of points and were easy finds, compared to the navigation and mental acuity it takes to do a memory-O at the end of a long day, for only 50-point CPs.
I had saved lots of room for dinner, which I always enjoy... burgers on Saturday.
Post-Day1
It's always fun to share stories from the day over dinner, with the other teams. We sat with the girls again, and a volunteer who had been dotwatching came by to ask what had happened to us in the cliffs in the east, haha. At least those incidents make for good stories, even if they feel like disasters when you're in the middle of it.
It felt like we had done damage to our day at the time, but it was only about 90 minutes elapsed between when we got CP80 vs when we got CP74 in our long walk along the cliffs. The girls had run into some challenges of their own going west, too, coming across a a million parallel unmapped trails that gave them a lot of trouble.
The best news was that the girls had stumbled across a lone set of spikes and turned it in to lost and found. Somehow, they, of all teams, had managed to find pretty much a needle in a haystack... a set of spikes in a zillion acres of land. I was glad to be able to start day 2 with 2 sets of spikes again.
We ended up covering 15.15 mi in 9:28:03 with 3,729ft of ascent on day 1. Less than our usual because of the icy conditions, but it still felt like a lot.
DAY 2
Race
We had a good plan mapped out for Day 2. We took our "usual" way down again, and we got CP30 at Eagle's Nest, followed by CP101 at "rootstock at vegetation boundary". Easy points. The last time I had been in this area of Summit Bechtel was at the GORUCK Sere HH, which was an event that had a very different atmosphere.
We went across the bridge and got a point on the catwalk of the bridge, which was fun.
CP31 required a bit of exploration to find a good way to get in at the "spillway overlook", but we had been in that general area before. CP99 "small water course" was like a stream.
We went ahead and got CP47 at "base of 3m cliff"... not a lot of points, but we were up in the general area already, and we've seen that area before. We came across some big bear prints on the way there.
There's a hill with a bunch of random trails, and we got CP79 up there. There were some nice views from the top on our way there from the ridgeline trail.
We went to the lodge to do the normal-O next. We went counter clockwise. We were among the teams that got thrown off by a parallel error at first, before SB caught it and we turned back south to go to a different corner's reentrant. The normal-O's map only lets you see the one correct corner and reentrant, and the other is more prominent even though it's not on the map, so many people wanted to go there.
CP2 was on a brair-filled hill top where we first ran into BRF BARF two years ago. We then tackled CP3 and CP4 by taking trails. Rarely used trails can be a bit tricky to follow sometimes. We climbed our way up to CP5 on some more seemingly random trails, and then we made our way down a re-entrant to CP6. These Normal-O flags are small, so you really have to be in the right spot and have your eyes open to see them! The overall presence of snow in many (but not all) places did mostly help, though, since you could at least see where others have gone. They're usually right, though not always right, since we'd make fresh tracks unintentionally, in places where the points were not, at times.
SB and I had a good system where I took distance measurements and she took bearings for the attack points where we would need them. That system felt quite efficient, and we were able to nail a number of points that way. We'd use intersections, reentrants, and the like, as attack points and got CP7, cp8, and CP9 that way.
On CP10, we got into a convo with a solo male racer and didn't take our originally planned trail to CP10 and nearly missed it and had to backtrack a bit to get it. It was at an odd spot near the water, but down a cliff, and not on the waterfront trail, since the trail there was a bridge through the water. Quite unexpected, although it is on the map like that, so it should've been expected.
On the way from there back to the Normal-O finish, during one of my periodic checks if I still had both of my spikes, I discovered that one was missing. Fortunately, I knew that it couldn't be too far back because I had been checking regularly, so I ran ran back and found it, not far from where the girls' team was walking towards us... they almost had a chance to find my wayward spikes twice!
We were still doing good on time, so we went for CP89 at "bend in old road", then CP39 "adult women only", which is always a fun one. It's funny to me that the only times I've been in the camp restrooms at Summit Bechtel, it's been for non-restroom reasons.
We went down in a trail system and took a different-but-still-got-us-there route to find CP109 at "shallow spur".
We found a gentler way to get up to CP69 at "tree, north part of clearing" from the big bowl, and then we went down to get CP38 "under bridge", CP48 "pit", and CP97 "south edge of island" around the water. We had never noticed an island like that on the property before. The melting ice turned into a bit of a stream flowing down the boardwalk leading to the island.
We skipped CP37 since it wasn't worth a lot of points and required climbing and finding, but we grabbed CP41 "1m band of rock" down a trail near and area that has had a point in the past, CP53 at a bridge on an unmapped trail (marked "mystery"), and CP87 "under bridge" ("bridge" was spelled out this time for some reason). From there, we climbed out of the MTB system and went to one of our favorite areas, the climbing walls. We didn't have to climb walls this time (maybe a good thing, due to the ice), but we did climb steps up the top of the rappelling area.
Our timing was where we had plenty of time left where we didn't feel under a bunch of pressure, but not so early that we felt like we had to find new areas to attack more points. From the north tower, we went up a back/southern trail system to get onto the road that takes cars up to Yamagata. CP45 was on the way back home. It felt odd that we didn't end up taking the ski slope at all this year.
We finished 17.33 mi in 8:49:40 with 3,182ft of gain, good enough for a cold, windy, and rainy day 2, with time to shower before dinner.
We were not lacking in adventure this year.
I was glad to get to wear my tiger hat for at least one day. My goal for next time is to wear a full tiger costume. That would be fun.
I do hope this event comes back (and within reasonable driving distance, although I think it would be worth flying for, too). It's a weekend full of fun and wonder, made all the better by being able to do it with a good friend who enjoys navigation and adventure just as much.
