Ås by Night & Fog Cup #4 (20/01/2015)

Not the best night for trailblazing. :-)

10 cm of fresh powder on top of a more crumbly base layer, sufficient to cover the heather and create hidden holes and traps, as well as making even light green visually impassible due to the snow on every branch. OTOH it was probably good O training!

Ran around on the paths to #1, then took a compass course from the top of the knoll, but didn't manage to keep the course due to the snow-covered vegetation. Had to bail to the path then try again to find it, losing 2 min to the best split time, but the guys starting later would have had a huge advantage.

OK to #2, even if the initial struggle to locate the path was pretty bad: I lost over 2 min to the fastest split here, without any miss or hesitation.

I should probably have gone back up to the path towards #3, the route I took caused me to fall several times, the worst spill was when the snow-covered heather hid a pretty deep hole where I fell in up to my chest! I though I crossed the power line a bit further east, by the indistinct (i.e. invisible tonight) path and it took me a while to relocate, then I spent some additional time locating the control cliff.

OK to #4

Good route to #5 but bad execution. It was really hard to control distance and direction in the dark green (densely planted & snow-covered spruce), so I ended up on the wrong knoll.

OK to #6

I lost a huge amount of time to #7 without making any obvious mistakes, I suspect that the faster runners must have followed a track along the hillside.

OK to #8, ran as much as possible on the paths even if the one going uphill was covered by totally virgin snow.

On #9 there was another cliff NNE of the one with the control, this one was larger than where the marker was placed.

Bad execution to #10, it would probably have been better to go straight ad find the path as quickly as possible.

Crossing the field towards #11 I found some old tracks so I followed them up to the corenr and took the path.

I decided to go straight towards the final control since I couldn't see any reasonable alternative.