Monkey Mountain Orienteering Report

It is off-season for cyclist here in the Midwest. Time to put in those base miles and work on some cross training to keep the fitness up. One of the things I like to do during the winter is to participate in some Orienteering meets. The Possum Trot Orienteering Club hosted a round Sunday out a Monkey Mountain Park in Grain Valley. A nice park with a good combination of dense woods, open fields, rolling hills, creeks, valleys and such.

I normally do these solo, but I really want to get an Adventure Race team together so I invited Sean Gaulter, Mark Krause, Chris Love out to the event. Mark brought his friend Steven out and Chris's girl friend Cynthia Twibell joined in the fun.

Mr. Love was so kind as to give the first timers in our group a crash course in Orienteering. Both Chris and Cynthia helped get our maps all marked with our first course of the day- the white course. We split up in two teams with All Ready Lost (Love/Twibell) and Gravel Grinders (Mark, Sean, Steven & Me) The White course was a short 1.9 kilometers long but still offered a challenge as even our instructor of the day got lost once :-) The Gravel Grinders did what they do best and grinded along at a steady pace and hit all the controls without getting lost. Well, we got a little off track trying to find control #2, but we will not mention who (cough ...Sean) lead us a stray. Once back on track we used a lot of team work and kept up the pace well enough to finish with the quickest time of the day (1st out of 5 teams) for the White course. Not bad for three beginners and and old fart like myself.

After a short break we decided to run the 3.8 kilometer Orange course. This time Chris and Cynthia joined the Gravel Grinders as a team. The Orange course was double the distance and the controls were at a lot harder locations to find. Again we worked as a team and was able to stay on track and my encouragement keep the pace high enough to stay a top the leader board with a time of 42:18 We we left for the day were were 1st out of 10 teams for the Orange course. I will check back tomorrow to make sure we stayed there and hopefully we did. It is official. We kicked butt - Monkey Mountain Results

With 1, and possibly 2 wins, this season is already starting off better than last. Some pictures from the day posted below.