2003 Night on Bald Mountain

In October, we were back to the fall classic: Night on Bald Mountain. As this years event was not part of the PCC, we opted to run in the equipped class and run the Curta. NoBM is a gravel event, starting in the early evening near Olympia. The rally finishes around 11pm after traversing various back country dirt roads. This time however we were not the only ones out there, as this was during the beginning of hunting season there were lots of hunters driving and camped along the roads. Combine this with pea-soup like fog and rain it was a challenging event. The Curta proved to be a strong ally, as our penalties per checkpoint were more than halved. It was not long before Benson could have entire stages pre-calc'd to all the NRI's. From there it was up to me to drove to the times. The only flaw was that we were still using the stock odometer, so we still had the navigation dificulties this offers like "when is the turn?" "in...uggg..aaa...pretty soon?!?". Benson and I really enjoyed NoBM as it was not far from home and felt like the right length. Since it was at night, we didn't feel like we were giving up our entire weekend for an event. With the night's challenges we were plenty glad to go home too! We also got some hardware for our effort as we took 2nd in equipped class.