Team Teriyaki Donut in the Seward Park Street Scramble 2007

Introduction

With Omar out until late July at best, Teriyaki Donut is me, Greg Barnes, on a bike pulling our 4-year old, Emmett, in a Burley trailer. Seward Park had a special format for a Street Scramble: evening start, 2 hours, with half the checkpoints in the park as standard orienteering controls (you punched the answer sheet to prove you were there) and half outside the park in the standard Street Scramble format.

My wife and Omar volunteered, and Terry sent them to be checkpoint monitors.

We live in NE Seattle, so our knowledge of the Seward Park area is not vast, but I've biked around there (and on Beacon Hill, which proved to be useful) a few times. Before the Scramble, I studied the area, particularly near Graham Hill, where I figured we would most certainly go. I decided the best approach up Graham Hill was probably from the south, and hence my route should probably be counterclockwise. Unfortunately, I completely forgot this when I planned our route. I also decided the orienteering checkpoints may be harder to find when it got darker, and so we should do them first. This we actually did.

Teriyaki Donut visited all the checkpoints a bike team could (three park checkpoints were on trails in the park and therefore out-of-bounds to bikes), but we were a minute late, so we ended up with 990 points. This was the the third highest score overall, our highest score ever, and (I believe) the first time a family team has visited all the checkpoints. We rode almost 20 miles, including many hills.

Our route:

Park controls: 44, 41, 31, 34, 24, 42, 23, 21, 33, 45, 22, 32.

Checkpoints: 36 [parking meters], 51 [Martha Washington Park], 49 [Graham Hill Elementary], 35 [Othello Park], 53 [Pritchard Island Beach], 47 [house garage door], 55 [animal on house fence], 48 [Holly Park house], 56 [Planet Georgetown], 57 [Dearborn Park Elementary], 46 [St. Edwards School], 37 [church], 52 [street end pottery], 54 [Stan Sayres dock], 43 [Andrews Bay boat ramp]

Our route, courtesy of Gmaps pedometer.

Notes

• Omar let slip that he would be doing his monitoring at 'a sandy beach', which I knew wasn't much of a giveaway, since there were a number of such beaches nearby, and I figured they'd all be checkpoints. The answer sheet also gave away that we'd be going to Georgetown, which was farther than I had thought. Other than that, I didn't have much prior knowledge of the checkpoints.
• For some reason, I was thinking the maps would be arranged side-by-side along the long axis of the paper. Instead, they were side-by-side along the short axis, which meant my map was sideways in my map holder. Another ergonomic problem was the requirement to punch the answer sheet. After taking it in and out of my holder a few times, I decided it was much more efficient to just hold onto it until we finished all the park checkpoints.
• Participants were slow to show up, so it wasn't surprising that the start was delayed for 10 minutes. It was fortuitous for us, in fact, since Emmett decided he had to use the toilet at around 6:56. He had a bag of trail mix and a water bottle in the trailer, and he didn't complain during the event. I figured he'd fall asleep before we were done, as his bedtime is nominally 8pm, but for the first Scramble this year he stayed awake the whole time.
• As the start was being counted down, we hung out a little to the south of the shelter, since we were actually ready to go on time for once, and we didn't want to run over any runners. Still, I had to work to stay in front of the fastest foot participants until we got out onto the street. Luckily for us, the fastest foot participants chose to go down to control 32 first, leaving us to get controls 44 and 41 in relative peace. Jake Reeder jetted out in front of us, and we never caught him, although we did see him heading away from control 32 while we were heading toward it. The fast foot teams also caught up with us again briefly at control 31, but after passing them again, we had no more worries about crowds.
• On the way to control 34, Dave Enger passed us going the other way. It wasn't clear to me if he took the park loop counterclockwise, but if he did, he was the only team we saw doing so.
• Around the park, we were roughly matched by Rogers Bikers, a four person/ four bike family team where, at least from what we saw, they divvied up the work, with one of them navigating, and one who always punched the answer sheet. We finally managed to pass them for good at around control 33, where the puncher ran into the brush near the control (she was okay). We last saw them as we were leaving control 32; I don't think we saw any bike teams from that point on until after the finish.
• We finished the park checkpoints (340 points) in 22 minutes.
• I had thought the hill out of the park might be a problem but it really wasn't. At the parking meters (36), a guy stopped us and asked what was going on. I was at first afraid we had run over his plants with the Burley trailer, but he just seemed curious, so I quickly explained it was sort of a scavenger hunt, that (in this case) we had to find out the time limit on the middle set of parking meters, and gave him the website URL. Apparently he remembered it, as Terry said they contacted MerGeo the same day.
• At Martha Washington Park (51), we of course saw Omar and Elizabeth, which surprised me because this was not a sandy beach. (I subsequently learned they were supposed to be at Pritchard Island Beach (53), which was definitely sandy.) Elizabeth asked me her questions, even though she knew the answers, so we got no special treatment. In fact, Emmett started howling about how he wanted his mommy, which continued all the way up the hill to Graham Hill Elementary (49).
• On the way to 51, I for some reason thought the hill up Holly looked reasonable. It really wasn't, but once we started going up, there was no good reason to turn back. Well, the cobblestones in the last block before Seward Park would have been a good reason, but we didn't see them until we were almost upon them, halfway up. That was not fun.
• When approaching Graham Hill from the south, I at first thought we were heading for a locked gate. Luckily, it turned out to be a chicane instead (two half-fences with a sizable gap). I had originally planned on reaching the next checkpoint, Othello Park (35), by heading back to Seward Park Ave, but I decided it made more sense to head west first. From Othello Park to Pritchard Island we ended up heading down Rainier, looking for the correct place to turn (Kenyon, as the hill is less steep as you head south), but overshot. Then heading south on Seward Park, we again overshot the street I thought we wanted (the one that heads directly to the checkpoint), but didn't notice until we followed a sign that said 'Pritchard Island Beach' and ended up having to head back north to get to the lifeguard tower. It's a good thing we didn't take the street I wanted, as it doesn't go through.
• We hit the light at MLK and Cloverdale just in time, and started up a gradual climb of Beacon Hill. Just north of 55 (animal on house fence), we saw the access marked on the map; the street will go through once a housing development is completed, and it's already mostly paved. But the ends are not paved, and the upper end had a fence across it (but you could clearly get around it). I decided the hill climb wasn't going to get any better, and climbed up the steep hill, then struggled to drag the bike and Burley around the fence.
• At this point, there was around 1 hour left, and I knew going down to Georgetown was a gamble. I had planned on picking up 48 and 57, the two checkpoints on the Chief Sealth Trail, after Georgetown, but decided it was more direct, and therefore probably faster, to pick up the Holly Park checkpoint (48), zoom down Graham to Georgetown, then head up to Dearborn Park (57). I had a little trouble picking up the trail on Othello, but didn't have any trouble descending Graham, despite the steep grade, as all the traffic was heading uphill. I figured there were two reasonable ways back up the hill, Graham, or the Lucille flyover from Georgetown, which puts you north of Cleveland High, but on the way down I decided Graham was too dangerous, and backtracking up Albro made more sense than taking Lucille. We probably hit Georgetown with around 40 minutes to go.
• The most direct way up Beacon Hill from Cleveland High School is Dawson (the flatter, less direct choice takes you all the way up to Columbian near the VA Hospital). It turns out Dawson is less of a grade than Holly, but not by much, and it's longer. And, of course, we had already been riding for almost 90 minutes. As in the past when I towed Omar up the hill out of the Vashon Ferry Dock, I didn't know if we would make it, but I knew even the slowest pedaling was faster than pushing the bike and trailer up on foot, so I gritted my teeth, looked down, and started counting the number of pedal strokes. I figured it would take 100, and I was about right (it took around 70 to get up Holly). Once we hit the top, we had about 30 minutes to go, and I was determined we were going to sweep the course, as I knew it was all (basically) downhill from there.
• It was a lovely night, one of the longest of the year, and Seattle Schools had just had their last day. So there were a lot of people out on the streets, enjoying the weather (and, I assume for some of the kids, the end of school). This was particularly evident near Dearborn Park and our fast descent down Orcas off Beacon Hill, where there were a lot of families and groups of friends. We once again just barely made the MLK light, which was followed by another short hill.
• We had seen a few foot teams near Holly Park, and after we crossed Rainier, we saw a few more near checkpoint 37 (church). I was a little confused here, going up the small street/alley, but so was the foot team we saw as we were leaving. We didn't have time to say anything other than that they were at the wrong building.
• We reached Stan Sayres Park back on Lake Washington with a little over 10 minutes left. The construction was not as bad as I thought it might be, but I didn't see the bench we were looking for right away. There were a few people hanging out, and they quickly started pointed to it behind a couple of cars. The woman sitting on the bench thoughtfully made room for us to read the plaque, and laughed with me at the thought of someone being a friend of 'infrastructure'. They told me we should hurry up, as someone had been there 24 minutes earlier, but my real race was with the clock. We had 9 minutes left.
• At the Andrews Bay boat ramp (43), I got a little too clever by taking the footpath, and almost missing the sign, which was at the parking lot. The boat ramp wasn't obviously a boat ramp, but I figured it out, and had about 4 minutes left. We saved a minute or so by again taking the footpath into the park and avoiding the one way loop, but we had one hill left, the one back up to shelter #3. We got to the finish line after my watch alarm had let me know we were officially late, and still needed to mark a couple of answers. We turned in the answer sheet about 56 seconds late, thus avoiding an extra 10 point penalty.
• Afterwards, I volunteered to pick up park controls, since Emmett went home in the car and I had a largely empty trailer. It's a good thing we'd visited them before, as it was getting dark and they weren't easy to see. Some more lucky people were celebrating the evening on boats in Andrews Bay; I could hear them laughing as I picked up the last few ones. By the time I returned to the shelter, the awards ceremony was almost done and it was quite dark.
• The most interesting checkpoints were, in my opinion, Pritchard Island Beach (53) and Martha Washington Park (51). We had been meaning to check out those parks for a long time.

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