Now that the Middle Earth Middle Distance race is officially over, I can confess that we were guilty of visiting the Redwood Treewalk while it was embargoed yesterday.  We hadn’t read the fine print in the program, and we thought the Treewalk would be an interesting thing to do on our day off. It was only afterwards that our misdemeanour was brought to our attention.  Seeing the giant redwood trees from the viewing platforms half way up gave us no advantage whatsoever, as there were no controls to see. Just beautiful forest giants, along with lush ferns.  We didn’t do any of the walks on the forest floor.   …

The race itself was wonderful. We had a 1:7500 scale map with 2.5 metre contour intervals so very readable.  The contour features were very subtle, my course only had 20 metres of climb, so we knew to take care. However there were enough tracks to use junctions as attack points, and this worked very well.  I was able to run to a point as close to my control as I could get, then take a careful bearing into the forest and back out again, then on to the next control.  It was soft and clean underfoot and I zipped around in a respectable 49 minutes to finish 6^th.  The Swedes were very much at home today.

We were most impressed by the infrastructure – there was a massive shade sail over the finish and results, which made a great gathering point.

We were also impressed by “Gandalf”, who they had propped up in the middle of otherwise featureless forest to provide a man made object. He was quite the photo opportunity.

We have been warned to wear scuba gear for tomorrow’s sprint, as the lake level has risen considerably and some of the control sites are now under water …

Later we went back to the redwoods at night to see the lanterns.  The UFOs are landing!