DCR Breakheart Reservation, Saugus, MA
April 10, 2022
Meet Director: Tobias Karlsson

Update, April 11, 11:45 PM: Corrected splits for Green and Red courses.

What a great day! The weather was quite pleasant. Certainly much better than the hail and thunderstorm that drenched me the day before while placing the controls.

A great number of people came to the event. Looks like we had 113 starts with a little bit of emphasis on the Brown and Green courses. As always people blunder on various controls, but I didn’t hear much about any specific control causing a great amount of frustration.

At this early time of the year, the terrain is very open and relatively easy to navigate, so even when the map showed thick vegetation, it was still quite open. Speaking of the map, it is certainly a bit out-of-date and a fair amount of trails have changed. This certainly causes frustration when designing courses, but of course also makes it difficult for participants when I end up sending them through those areas.

While preparing the courses, I’ve run into a group of deer in the south-east corner of the park. On one encounter they initially started running away from me, but then stopped, held their ground, and just watched me pass by. Even on the event day, they decided to greet us by running past the start area.

Even though we printed quite a large number of maps, we managed to run out. Thanks to everybody who surrendered their map so that a second person could use it!

We had a lot of volunteers that helped out. I apologize if I missed anybody. At the Computer Station: Mark O'Connell, Mori Finlayson-Johnecheck, Michael Cooper, and Sam Altenberger. At Setup, Registration, and Meet and Greet: David Landrigan, Channon Ames, Jim Paschetto, Barry Ford, Kelly Guarino, Ian Finlayson, Karen Yeowell, and Andy McIlvane. Control Pick-up: Jonathan Campbell, Victoria Campbell, Nils Peters, Kelly Guarino, Justin Wiley, and Karen Yeowell. I’d also like to thank Jonathan Campbell for making the maps look professional.

Finally, I’d like to express appreciation for the new format where we basically have two meet directors, or should I say one meet director and one course setter. For this event Wendy Johnecheck did the bulk of the planning, organization, volunteer coordination, and event execution. I just had to setup the orange-and-white flags in the woods. So in other words, thank you Wendy for basically running this event. It made my work much easier and less stressful.


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