Lost and Found

Monday, 21 August 2023

After I finished work today I drove back to the finish of the event on Saturday and set out to find Jett's compass which he lost when he stopped to tie his shoelace then went on without it.

By looking at his route on Livelox, Jett could see where he had already looked for his compass (losing him 4 minutes and the local victory) - it's the bit circled in blue:

But then watching more closely, he could also see that he paused for a moment at the area I've circled in yellow, which was the set of rocks that I was headed to today.   This was quite a journey.  First I had a 15 minute drive out of town, then I had a 2km run on a flattish fire trail, then it was straight up a huge hill for around a kilometre.  It felt slightly weird coming back all by myself to a random patch of bush in the middle of nowhere but it was kind of nice to enjoy the area and the views without being in race conditions:

I was hoping I was going to see the compass sitting neatly on one of the three boulders but unfortunately that wasn't to be so I had to search around amongst all the fallen timber on the ground nearby. After a few minutes of tromping around I'd just decided to give myself another ten minutes of searching before giving up when I spied it lying on the ground:

Phew!  The next best thing to finding the compass was that it was a very easy, almost-all-downhill run back to the car which I reached after an almost exactly 5 kilometers round trip.