Rain and Ribbons

The park rangers asked us to modify the courses in order to avoid two camp areas, so as a result advanced courses got two easy controls instead of one of the difficult ones. Oh, well... Nothing I can do about it, just don't get surprised when you see those two controls and road between them...

Anyway, now the courses are final and I went into the park to set ribbons today. Tanya couldn't go with me as she had to spend the whole day at the Raleigh Little Theater (preparation for Peter Pan just got started and Tanya is in the deck crew). Jumping ahead, I am glad, that I put my lenses on instead of the glasses! Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to set an many ribbons as I did today.

I started from the Visitors Center and made a big circle (8-9KM) visiting almost all Orange, Brown, Green and Red controls. Spent a lot of time (4 hours), mostly because of the difficulties with dry ditches. Maybe I am imagining things, but it looks like the north part of the park is not mapped as accurately as the south one. So many dry ditches not shown on the map - in some cases it gets really confusing. I spent about 30 minutes on one of the controls (east of the Visitor Center), trying to pin point the exact location of a dry ditch I was looking for. Ouch. Hopefully, I selected the right one (took several different bearings to check), but I am still not as confident there as with other controls. There was also a place where I found two cliffs instead of one (some very curious terrain there). Finally, the power line should have been yellow instead of dark green (not a big deal, as the courses go across).

The rain started soon after I started, but it wasn't cold and I had lenses on, so I decided to keep on going and finished the circle. Ended up totally soaked, but not cold. All in all it was a good walk - and most of the work was done.

There are 4 ribbons remaining for tomorrow, plus while and yellow course to visit. Maybe Tanya or Michael will join me for a walk this time.