Winter Wildcat 2024

 Over the Presidents' Day holiday, Sonja and I competed in the 2024 Winter Wildcat, hosted by Tanz Navigation. We did their event, The Search for Big Mack, back in September and loved it. We learned a lot during that event (like: be on time!) and intended on applying those lessons learned to this event. 

And we did! We did not arrive late! In September we lost 5 points per minute; in Winter Wildcat we would have lost 50 points per minute. We didn't lose any. w00t!

We were handed 3 maps Sunday morning, overcome by choices! Here's the East map:

That blank spot center top was interesting. At 7:55am, the race director put the missing rectangle up on the screen. You had as much time as you needed (note: 8am start) to draw the controls, contours, features. We didn't even consider going east. 

Here's the south map. It'll come up near the end of our story. 

Like I said, this map will feature at around 4pm or so that Sunday. And here is the map we spent most of our day on:

Note the folded over edges. That was so the map could fit in my map bag*. If you go to the Routegadget site for Winter Wildcat, you can follow our track. (Our team name is MTheads. Scroll down to Sunday only teams. Click both boxes when you get to our team. And you should probably press the + after you press play. In fact, press + a few times, otherwise you'll be sitting looking at our track.)

*A map bag hangs around the neck and has a see-through window on both sides. Here's an example as well as a pic of mine:

We first head downhill to 43, where we met a nice couple of military dudes who has also done Saturday. Following 43, we went down the road to 93, pretty easy to find considering it was worth 90 points. That gets us to about 45 minutes into the race.

We didn't do either of the Orienteering courses in The Search for Big Mack. This time we wanted to do the one and only O course, get a bunch of points (10 controls, 55 points each!). That's where we went next. And that course took us a bit over 2 hours, but I'm happy to report that we found each control right away. My nav is getting better and better. Some we crazily placed, on the side of a cliff. Thank God for my wife with her cat-like agility. 

This Scout base was so beautiful, I'm terribly jealous. Each camping area has a huge tower, probably 50' high. Very easy to see, and on the maps thankfully. We loaded up on water and headed over a beautiful bridge to control 53, already at 685 points!

53 was way deep, again thanks Sonja. Then up to 62 and 72, both easy to find. 72 was especially fun; it was an old wall tent and the control was inside. I didn't see it and was about to ask Sonja which side she wanted to walk around. But she was short enough to see the control inside! And that brings us to a bit under 5 hours. 

After 82 and 32 we had some decisions to make. We were at 5:40 and could have walked over the dam and start the walk back (to avoid late charges). But it was still early so we decided to go get some of the controls around the lake, worth 100+50+40, so well worth the 40 minutes it took us to walk that far. 

After that we marched on to an area that made me seriously jealous: a couple of huge and high zip-lines! Not to mention the great rock climbing areas. They were wonderful to use as nav points. We almost went to 40 but the cliffs and the way to get to 40 didn't seem worth it, instead went to 50, which Sonja climbed up to while I looked at maps. 

And that's where our issue started. Because of the time (we had some), we wanted to grab 30 and 83 south of 50. I pulled out the south map and put it on the back side of my map bag. After 83 (we never found it and I'm still pissed about it) we were at 7:40, so plenty of time. We decided to walk north up and around past 43, because I saw, as I flipped my map bag back-and-forth, the road will have a smaller road come up on the right which turns 180 and heads right up to the S/F building. So we started walking. 

When we passed 43 (at 8 hours), Sonja reminded me that we had gotten to 43 quickly and easily. I wasn't ready for so much uphill; bring on the easy road. 

There was no easy road. We walked another 11 minutes before I realized my error. The cliffs were telling. There was no road branching off and we were bound for another 2km of walking south if I hadn't noticed.

So we turned back and fast-walked to where the cliffs ended. We had seen a team going straight up the side of the hill (turns out it was about 50m straight up) and poo-poo'd them (I did at least). Well now we were walking up in their footsteps. This whole error cost us 30 minutes. 

Then we clicked the finish. Unfortunately too early because there where you finish was also the Memory-O, where you get to look at a map, then put it down and go find your controls. We still had a smidge over an hour at that point and maybe could have gotten a couple more controls. But alas, no. 

Still okay with it. Didn't lose any points due to being late, which is an improvement. Other lessons learned from Winter Wildcat: Sonja should bring her sunglasses; she was practically blind during the O which was in the open and snow covered and quite sunny. I need to put my glasses in the front pocket of my vest; I had to ask Sonja for help when I changed out from clear to sunglasses; and finally, and most important: have Sonja check my route. I'm certain she would have seen the mistake I made with roads. We ended up #102 out of 120 total teams, #16 out of 20 mixed sex teams. We'll take that!

Us before we started. No pics from the after. We were too busy stuffing our faces! Thanks Mark & Lora for another great Tanz event!