For months, the Birkhead Hiking Challenge (BHC) has lived rent-free in my head. I remain hopeful to one day fully navigate this course without the use of GPS. The cost? Many hours spent wandering in the woods, sometimes with mixed feelings of humiliation and exasperation.
For the BHC-curious, I set up a similar course at Cane Creek Mountains Natural Area (CCMNA) to give a small taste of this type of challenge. It was merely a test run, available for 2 weeks prior to a BOK open event at CCMNA on March 15 and taken down right afterwards.
This Cane Creek Mtns course was designed to "only" be about 1/10th as long as BHC. Based on data from Kevin's recent completion, that meant 6 miles, or 3 hours. Results indicate that I hit this target fairly well despite a disproportionately large number of stages (7).
I rationalized the discrepancy as follows: plotting and navigating with coordinates was the main entree, so there needed to be a "fair" number for practice. Furthermore, red pin punches hanging in "plain sight" had to be faster and easier to find than those buried at BHC, right?
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| can you spot the punch? |
That second point proved to not be entirely correct. Sorry, Brian! Paranoid that stage 3 in particular might go missing in the two weeks that the course was deployed, I took to hiding it inside a nearby stump and provided participants with a cryptic geocache-y hint: "PINE SNAP."
I received valuable feedback from a few brave souls who ventured out of their comfort zones to give it a shot. I have a crazy notion to scale this to a 24+ hour "lost one standing." It'd be fun to somehow bring geocachers into the fold. Here's Livelox replay, results and some quotes:
I don't think I really understood what I had gotten myself into and certainly wasn't in the right mindset for it. I didn't expect the searching aspect which left me mentally exhausted... But the added challenge of starting with an empty map was super fun.
Also:
One nice selling point for this challenge is that a careful and skillful navigator would almost certainly do much better than someone running quickly, as opposed to most of the "normal-O" competitions that rely more on foot-speed.
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