Results for Day 9 of the 2013 Sierra Ski-O Champs at Royal Gorge

[Tony Pinkham]

We had a very physical day at Royal Gorge, which is typically the case. Unfortunately, Brenda Giese was down with a severe cold and could not set the controls or be at the event, but she found Matthias Kohler, Ken Walker Sr, Damian Swift, and Kerie Raymond to set the controls and ski in the needed secondary trails the day before the event. We were definitely stretched thin at this event. Had we been able to provide the needed support for Brenda earlier on, she would have been able to do more of what she wanted to do for this event. 

We also learned a valuable lesson about making sure that all controls must be placed on mapped trails. In the case of the red and blue courses, we had a couple of controls off trail without showing trails leading to the controls, so we had to remove those two courses from the championships calculations. We had a similar problem with the green course and learned that we shouldn't use trails mapped as "ungroomed" for controls. Because the one control on that course was on a mapped trail, we left that course in the champs but we learned that we shouldn't use such a trail for controls in the future--not everybody can recognize those trails from all junctions. 

Other than those problems, people seemed to have a good time skiing the courses at Royal Gorge. There were some interesting route choices to the controls on the red course that I did. Had we had more resources for Brenda to make use of, we probably would have had more in the way of secondary trails but she had put in some interesting trails for controls near the James Joys and Hi Jinx trails. 

As with the previous day, skiing of trail was a joy at Royal Gorge. 

Tony