lessons from wildcat

My route data: ~50 miles, ~10K' climb; 64/90 CPs; red = day; blue = night; purple = missing data.

The seventh annual Winter Wildcat Rogaine was held this past weekend. It's listed as 2 x 10 hours on Saturday and Sunday. Since Big Mack in 2023, I wanted to attempt this bigger race, especially with Mark's permission to do it as a 24 hour! Thanks to Sean, I caught a ride up to WV after work on Friday.

My original plan was to try and clear the course in 24 hours. Based on Brian's data from 2022, I took that to mean covering about 60 miles and 11K' of climb. This would be a quantum leap from Gray Owl. Conditions were challenging on Saturday: cold rain and wind atop slushy snow, mud and swollen creeks.

For better or worse, I stuck to my plan and set out at 0800 to clear the eastern half of the course in the daylight, which held higher risk for me getting cliffed out. Navigation went relatively well with a focus on "slow, safe and steady." My thermals and poncho kept me just warm enough on the move.

The purple shows where the fence extends and the red is what line I thought I was on. 

My biggest daytime bobble was at 43. I should have definitely paid closer attention to my compass, but by the time I got down to the reentrant (which was absolutely gushing from all the rain), I just assumed it was the main creek (Hamilton Branch) and wasted too much time looking. I eventually found it though!

Back at Yamagata: after changing clothes, eating dinner and reloading food/water in my pack (in that order), I was finally ready to set out into the night at 1930. I was the only one of over 100 racers doing this! Does that make me the stupidest? Considering it was still blowing cold rain, the answer is yes.

The north map was my nighttime destination of choice. I understood it to be more forgiving with lots of open land and distinct manmade features, many of them illuminated throughout the night. I first grabbed a few memory-o points, but recent experience kept me from visiting those appearing thorny and wet.

Besides, I sort of felt naked in the cold, dark drizzle without a map. Onwards I continued counter-clockwise to the start of the normal-o. After warming up a bit in the building at the S/F, I set out to clear the 10-control course in a glacial 3 hours with all sorts of difficulty finding flags without handrails.

I had to visit each flag on this course in order. Turns out there's an abundance of some type of reflective lichen that lights up better than the (non-reflective) controls. Anyways, it was a lot of fun. I'd catch glimpses of Yamagata lit up like the Tower of Sauron and swear that I could hear Mark's evil laughter.

Happy to be back on the rogaining circuit, I plodded on through the night grateful for a break in the weather. The moon and stars were beautiful, but I was sobered by occasional strong gusts of wind, which reminded me to keep moving. I had ambitions of completing the draw-o right at daybreak...

But then drowsiness caused me to become utterly disoriented and confused right after 72. I wandered around aimlessly trying to make sense of the symbols on my map. Just then the rain started back up. I was done. I eventually found my way back up to Sauron just after dawn. Would I do it again? Absolutely!

A big thank you to Mark and Lora for organizing!

En route home. PC: Sean.