tools

we're not so fancy, humans. we used to say that we were the only species on the planet that used tools, and then we learned that a number of species use tools so then we modified our opinion to say we're the only species that MAKES tools but it's been discovered that a fair number of animals make simple tools as well.

i'm still going to say that we're the only species that uses a smelter, but we weren't always so fancy. we used to make simple tools like digging sticks and pounding rocks and if you're out in the woods or in a pinch you can still make and use primitive tools.

when i'm camping i habitually do not make a fire unless i need heat, and i carry a small stove for cooking purposes.

i have campcraft skills, though. lashing, flintknapping, the whole deal. you never know when you're going to need a little table or an extra roasting fork or if you'll come across a wild patch of jerusalem artichokes you'll want to roast later.

maybe you don't NEED to make your own cordage or containers, but isn't it nice to know you can?

with small modifications birch bark can be turned into funnels, bowls, baskets. do not ever strip bark from live trees. you can sew sides together with grasses and seal holes with pine pitch. you need a little primitive hole punch in a hurry? find a buckthorn tree.


one of the items on the (you knew this was coming, right?) venture vermont challenge is to make a camp cooking utensil using natural materials. i made a simple roasting fork. it's a little more advanced than a marshmallow stick, but it works just fine, is easy to do, and i think there's kind of a primal pleasure in making even simple tools you can use.

because i was not making a fire to cook with and making this particular fork for demonstration purposes, i found some deadwood so i didn't need to needlessly damage a living tree. if i'd been cooking, i would have used green wood because it doesn't burn so much. alternately, if you've got time, you can soak a dry wood item in clean water. you want to use a hardwood, like maple or applewood or hickory. conifers have resins that won't taste good on your food, and their sap is flammable. if you're in doubt about what kind of wood to use, smell it. if you can imagine that smell on your food it'll probably be good for your roasting fork.

state-sanctioned activities

i was writing up a little thing about an activity for the venture vermont challenge.

maybe it's because it's past my bedtime, but i am amused by this list of state-approved -nay, state-SUGGESTED activities.

heh.

victory salute

i want you to do this every day: raise your arms above your head and accept the applause of the imaginary crowd. you do not need wait until you have won the tour de france or been elected chancellor of germany to do this; you can do it if you have managed to put on socks or remembered to unload the dishwasher.

say "yes! i am AWESOME."

because you are, too. if you are waiting until you solo climb up everest before you call yourself awesome, you will wait a long time. accept smaller goals.

plus it's hard to be grumpy when your arms are up and you are basking in your awesomeness.

michigan

two stories at once:

a "michigan" is a hotdog. it is supposedly originally from plattsburgh, ny, althopugh in michigan a smiliar hotdog is known as a "coney", but on coney island they call it a "michigan".

so anyway, today i was out playing and i didn't pack a lunch because i thought i'd just get something at dunkin' donuts because 1) lazy and 2) gift card.

but then i didn't see a single dunkin' donuts for SIX HONKIN' HOURS.

and then i thought i'd just stop at a place with a takeout window but the place i stopped at was selling mediocreburgers for TEN DOLLARS. one hotdog for six.

really?

so i drove down the road until i got to goodie's snack bar in west addison where you can get a michigan for two and a half dollars and the people there aren't the type of people who think ten dollars is a good price for a plain hamburger.

and now the sun is going down and i need to crawl "upstairs" into the back of my car and sleep.

nighty-night.

state highway 108

state highway 108 is more famously known as the mountain road in stowe, or the smuggler's notch road. it is closed at the first snowfall every winter and does not open again for car traffic until the snow melt in spring.

see, vermont is a small state, a long narrow state, and we have this chain of mountains running right up the center of the state and there aren't a lot of ways to get across those mountains.

many of those roads get closed in winter.

route 108 is notable because near its top it is so narrow and winding that it is NOT RECOMMENDED FOR TRACTOR TRAILERS year-round. it is also not recommended for tour busses.

but it's a fantastic road, and last week i went up there just to take some video of the drive across from gate to gate. i think it's cooler looking westbound into jeff, so that's what you get.

burger barn

sometimes food is just good.

sometimes it is life-changingly good.

i don't mean that a cheeseburger is going to make you a better person or pay off your student loans or find a cure for cancer, but a really good cheeseburger can make your day and fill  you with a sense of awe that the world is an amazing place that a thing of such deliciousness could come to exist.

yesterday i was with my friend miletsone17 for a long day of paddling and she suggested we go get burgers at a stand in jeff.

(that's jeffersonville, a village in the town of cambridge, but we're all on first name basis, so everybody just calls it "jeff".)

neither of us had been there, but she was in the mood for a burger and we had passed it on our way to put in and take out boats.

the first thing that makes an impression on me is that there are a bazillion kinds of burger and they are all made with locally raised grass fed beef. i have been to burger joints where they have locally raised grass fed beef, but i've come to expect that these burgers will cost between eight and twelve dollars.

but no.

these burgers range from five dollars to eight and a half dollars, and the average, i think, was about six.

you can get a plain burger, but they have a couple dozen choices of whimsically named burgers that come with some pretty imaginative toppings.

i had the ethan allen, a burger topped with grilled apple slices, cabot cheddar, and a cranberry-garlic mayo. the burger itself was flavorful and juicy, and the bun it all came on was good, too. the fries that we got with it were hand-cut, skin-on, and cooked just about perfect.

but that burger!

do you ever eat a thing so good that you are surprised by how good it is?

yeah, well, this burger was so good that i KEPT BEING SURPRISED every time i took another bite.

it was as if my synapses could not process that much deliciousness and retain the memory of it long enough to put the burger down and pick it up again.

it was FANTASTICALLY good.

that's the burger barn, in jeffersonville, vt. go there if you have the chance.

there is no indoor service, no restroom, and no parking lot to speak of. the people who work there are competent and pleasant, and the napkins they stock are large and durable, which you really need if you're going to eat a burger like that.


burger barn. routes 15 and 108 in jeff.

until the cows come home

yesterday i was visiting a marker on the route of the old crown point military road and a fairly large group of heiffers came over to look at me. you don't maybe realize what a large animal a cow is until a whole herd of them come running over to see you.

they were good natured, though.

but flask, i hear you say. are you so much of an expert on the personalities of cows?

well, no. if you've ever had a group of them come running over to look at you when they weren't happy to see you, you know the difference. there is a lot in an animal's body language that signals "you look suspicious to us, and we do not like you".

so anyway, these girls were friendly.

my dad wears me out.

yesterday i went out to play with my dad and stepmother.

that old boy wears me out.

LAST thursday we went out to play and i didn't get home until midnight and it took two days to recover.

this week i brought my stuff and slept in his driveway.

...but not before we got a flat tire. in the rain. in ticonderoga, new york.

yes, he offered me a bed inside. they have a guest room. i like my car. it's comfortable and i'm used to it.

later on maybe i'll show you some pictures or something.

two minutes at bingham falls

some of you, my little internet friends, live in hot dusty places and because you keep telling me you like pictures of cool green places when i am in one of those cool green places i always think of you and take pictures and sometimes video.

here are two minutes recorded at bingham falls, which just offrum state highway 108.

later on i'm going to talk about state highway 108, but for now, just some pretty video at the falls. these are taken from the same spot; one view downstream and one up.

thirty minutes on a hillside

one of the items on the venture vermont challenge  is to sit somewhere outside for a half hour and make a list of all the sounds you hear.

so here's mine:

heroes of the republic

this week jim jeffords died.

last week marion milne died.

jim jeffords was mostly a republican, but he was a vermont style moderate republican, which these days is not very much like being a regular republican. yeah, in vermont we have liberal republicans and conservative democrats. we have this odd little thing in which the two group get together and try to sort out their differences to benefit the greatest number of people of the state of vermont and we know we can't always get our way.

senator jeffords was a good and decent man. i was going to add stuff on to that sentence but really it's the whole of the story. he was good and decent and he worked hard for the public good, the good of the nation and the good of the state.

marion milne was a republican state legislator elected for two terms with support of both democrats and republicans. she was also good and decent, and her political career came to an end when she voted with her conscience and against her conservative constituents on the matter of civil unions. in her eyes it was a matter of fairness for all citizens of this state.

often i have a lot of snarky things to say about politics, but i have nothing snarky to say about either of these giants.

they were heroes of the republic.

skip.

my excuse for not talking to you yesterday was that i went out to meet some friends before we headed over to a party and then after the party i went careering all over lower franklin county with the party host and we were having such a good time she brought me home to dinner and she and her husband and i sat talking until way past my bedtime.

i don't even have pictures to show you, but i'm going to work on processing some pictures i took earlier just for you and maybe post them up or something.

talking to strangers

so today i was at a letterbox in stowe and found myself talking to some nice people from texas who turn out to be geocachers, but weren't geocaching on this vacation.

mmm-hm. yup. they are super amused by my idea of what constitutes hot weather. they are amazed by the beauty of our state capital.

and then i go to a cache up at sunset rock and there are people on the rock, a middle aged woman and a young girl. they invite me to sit down o the rock with them. we make some chitchat. they offer me lunch.

you know how i love lunch.

so we hang out. they've heard of geocaching, only never done one. i offer to let them find the one i just came from. i hand them my GPS and we go over there. then we have a look at a nearby glacial pothole.

fun!

flask's tourism bureau

these days i have been hanging out near stowe.

yes, the famous ski resort town. i live very near it in crow miles, but there's this mountain thingie between here and there so it's a bit of a drive, but the scenery is fantastic.

it's also a magical journey into a wonderland where rich people live carefree in second or fifth homes, and where moderately well-off come to have vacations once or twice a year. it is beautiful vermont landscape, only with a great number of shiny recreational outfitters, restaurants, and art galleries.

and the traffic is bad, because there are basically only two roads which inconveniently double as state highways.

people from away do not seem to realize it, but most of the cars are full of other people from away. i know, because i talk to a lot of them.

the thing i get asked most frequently is what people do for a living around here.

well, as a state, we produce agricultural products, artisanal foods, lumber, granite, and other people's vacations. our economy depends rather heavily on tourism.

the people i talk to are amazed at our lack of heavy industry.

yes, that's part of that tourism thing. we're selling good clean vacations in the mountains.

the people i talk to are delighted to know that prices are cheaper in waterbury or jeffersonville. they are amazed that locals fill water bottles at roadside springs. they giggle when i tell them that yes, i DO consider 85 degrees to be way too hot.

it is weird, being in stowe, because the people from away sometimes think that this is a place people retire to, but not a place people are FROM. in stowe when you tell them you grew up here in vermont, they say it's nice that your family already had property.

they don't consider the possibility of a plain little suburban neighborhood.

anyway, i am happy to tell these people from away where to find a good cheap brewpub and where to go for a bike ride and how to get out to the backroads (and how to get back!) and how to see out-of-the way things that are fun and cheap, the sorts of things locals might do.

today i went to fill my jug at  the big spring (it's totally a thing. you can look it up on maps.) and i met a couple who had just gotten married and they were posing for a photo with them and their names spelled out in vermont stones and long island shells.

sweet, you know?

and the woman was so happy to see me and then a guy drive up to fill jugs because she hadn't realized it was an actual water source and she went and filled her bottles as well.

i'm happy to talk with all these people who are visiting. i always thank them for coming, and i try to help them find good places to go that they will enjoy.

if you guys are ever coming to vermont, make sure you give me a little jingle and i'll try to get you good inside advice.

little house

i have an interest in outhouses.

primarily it's because i am often in places where an outhouse is tops in amenities. i am not talking about a nasty plastic hut that gets cleaned once every other season. those are gross.

but there exist some lovely composting toilets and just plain old fashioned outhouses that when well-managed, are convenient, inexpensive, and fairly sanitary.

a couple of days ago i was i hubbard park, which is on the hill behind the state capitol building. maybe later i will write and tell you more about vermont's capital city, because if you don't live here it's kind of hard to imagine our tiny little capital (population 7855 in the 2010 census), our gorgeous capitol and its public spaces, or the gun-toting civil liberties vegetarian gay rights lovefest vibe that sort of permeates downtown.

but anyway, i was up in hubbard park and i noticed that since i was there last they've installed some outhouses at strategic locations. they are exceptionally nice outhouses as these things go, and i took the liberty of making a little video tour to show you.

you've got mail!

sometimes things just fall together.

a long time ago when i started geocaching, i heard about letterboxing and i thought that sounded cool, only when i went to their homepage, they actually had text on it that said "geocaching for smart people", which made me think i did not want to play with those boys and girls.

still, there's a geocache type that's a hybrid letterbox and includes a stamp, and the whole stamp in the book thing is the thing i thought was cool about letterboxes in the first place, so then some years ago when i had the opportunity in a craft program to carve a stamp i was all over it.

but then when i tested it, the stamp material threatened to crack, so i put it aside until some day when i found an appropriate backing for it.

cut to this morning, when i woke up at 0400 and decided suddenly that TODAY i should go find a letterbox, because it's on the vermont venture challenge.

(why yes, i DO link to it a lot. no, i am not a spokesperson for the challenge, nor for the state parks. but you know, when all is said and done i am having a really fun time and i'm going to come out of it with a pretty shiny thing that will be my pass to the state parks all next season, plus right about now the state parks are sitting on the top of my list of things i am happy my tax dollars are being spent on, PLUS day admission to a state park is only three dollars, so it's a right bargain on top of it.)

a'ight. anyway.

first i had to go find my stamp and then i had to rummage around to find some kind of material i could use as backing and mix up some epoxy and then i went back on the LbNA site and they seem to have gotten over their momentary snit about the new kids and gone back to being the more genteel older cousin, which suits them better anyway,  and i found a box very near my house and packed up all my stuff along with my brandy-new journal for collecting stamps in and i hit the road.

but flask, i hear you say. letterboxing?

yeah. an activity in which people go out and find hidden boxes by way of clues and they stamp their personal stamp in the logbook at the box and stamp the box's stamp in their book, thereby showing proof of finding and also collecting little prints.

this has been going on for hundreds of years, right under your nose.

this morning i went to one called "the florida dolphin visits the richmond round church" which, oddly, is located by the round church in richmond.

yes, that's a thing. go look it up for yourself.

here's a little picture of the logbook with my stamp and above it you can see the box's stamp.

cool.

kite checking

i keep meaning to finish up my venture vermont scorecard, but i keep not being done with activities.

like, i have way more identifications on photos of critters and plants than i need, but for some reason i keep taking pictures of frogs and flowers.

you know, mostly because i do that stuff anyway, challenge or not. and i keep being in really pretty habitats that keep changing with the season.

one of the items on the list is to make and fly a kite.

ok, fine. i like craft projects. i like kites. i like playing outside.

i am also kind of enjoying having my neighbors never really be able to figure out what crazy pants activity i'll be working on next.

so i looked up kites you can build on the internets, because the internets are awesome that way.

incidentally, some moths ago i was telling someone how when i go camping i MUST be able to get wifi every day or so and they thought i was going toward the topic of my social media addiction and i was all like "how else would i look up cool geological formations or museum hours or be able to identify that bug?"

uh, anyway.


i found some kite designs that looked simple enough to do without launching on a PROJECT and there was this design for a little bumblebee kite that takes about ten minutes to make and uses printer paper and staples, so no awkward waiting for glue to dry or having to find doweling. i just took a page of a topo map i'd printed, grabbed a stapler and a hole punch, and i was off to the races.

it flies pretty well. not as stable or steerable as some of your fancier kites, but it's a thing you could do on a slow afternoon without much preparation and still have the satisfaction of flying a little thing you made yourself.

i heard this is where the party is

i was probably twelve years old the night i answered the front door to find a woman standing there with a marimba.

"i heard this is where the party is", she said.

so i let her in.

you know, because it was in fact where the party was. i do not know what kind of parties YOUR parents were throwing in the seventies, but MY parents were throwing the kind of party where a couple dozen strangers might show up with guitars and banjos and there'd be hours of singing.

do i need to tell you how fantastic this is for a kid? grownups are amazing exotic creatures and a group of grownups standing around drinking cocktails might shoo a kid away so they can talk about complicated grownup things but a group of grownups packed as tight as they will fit with guitars and banjos is essentially helpless. they need somebody small and flexible to squeeze in and out with snacks and beverages.

and a kid can sing, too, so a kid can be a full participant in a grownup party. it's kind of a sweet gig.

i am telling you this because i know you woke up today thinking that you would really like a story about my childhood.

and also it kind of explains a lot about me.

dollar menu

have you see the mcdonalds ad in which two women deem a man sexually unattractive until they see him order a particular hamburger off the dollar menu?

it's not even subtle. they outright declare him beneath them and then suddenly as soon as he orders a particular burger he's so hot they can't stop looking at him.

it's fifteen seconds of so wrong i can't even begin to know where to start my rant.

blister pack

two weeks ago i got poison ivy.

a week ago i got it again. it's not just like a skin irritant. you get an immune reaction that can hit your bloodstream and make trouble for you outside the immediate area of the blisters.

speaking of which, i have some fabulous pictures of the blisters, which i am not showing you.

you're welcome.

let's just say they are large and numerous.

and that i do not feel good.

forest road

back in june i went to a geocache down in the green mountain national forest out by glastenbury mountain. it's either a long hike of enough hours that you might consider staying overnight, or if you know the way back forest roads you can get to within five miles or so which makes it a day hike.

you have to make the trip in low gear because there are waterbars and some mudholes, but otherwise it's pretty good road and just plain pretty besides.

so here's forest road 325, otherwise known as castle brook road.

maybe?

honey, do you think one of these milks has gone off?

a long time ago

last month  i saw this really cool thing: pertroglyph faces carved by the abenaki. there is some disagreement as to whether these carvings are 300 years old or 3,000 years old. let's just say they're old.

and you can find them if you're looking; they are right downtown. they're on the register of national historic places.

but they have a restricted address. the national register doesn't want  to tell you how to get there, and the abenaki would just as well have the site be left kind of quiet. nobody minds if you take yourself there and have a look, provided you're respectful and don't mess anything up.

which is interesting, because at some point the DAR hired a rock carver to deepen the carvings, so what we have to look at today aren't the originals, but they're a supposed facsimile and the abenaki consider them legitimate.


so they're not so much the archeological real thing, but they're very close.

some of your tinfoil hatters like to call them evidence that aliens visited north america in the precolumbian era, but a great number of sensible people just see the faces and think: huh. apparently this is a representation of some kind of face as done by local people before white settlers came.

it may or may not depict an antler headdress.

the faces may have some ceremonial significance, or they may just be evidence that fishing was slow one day.

i'm ok with not knowing.

one thing we know for certain about the site is that people still fish there, and local kids toss their beer cans nearby.

this past july fourth weekend some kids (i'm assuming youth) threw a crapton of empty fourth-of-july budweiser beercans there, which i think is kind of emblematic of the larger issues.

historical facts

for the venture vermont challenge, one of the items is to lern a historical fact about a vermont state park.

recently i was at a geocache in camel's hump state forest and found some interesting historical information, courtesy of the cache hider who is the recently retired forester for that parcel:

2014 catamount classic pro xct

instead of telling you about a race i was IN two days ago, i'm going to tell you about a race i was AT last week, because i'm working on clearing off my desk and first things first.

i love sporting events.

by sporting events, i mean "events in which athletes demonstrate awesome abilities, courage, and skill" and not "huge hyped up profit-making multi-millionaires  with huge entourages and media-managed machines".

so i love curling, ski racing, and mountain bike racing.

the superbowl, not so much.

anyway, last week i was at the catamount classic xct pro race, which is a weekend of races and events that include elite professional races as well as citizen class races and races for children. because typically i volunteer at this event i don't get to see the thing the way spectators do, but i get a very deep view of a narrow point.

in this case i saw a lot of the morning action on saturday from the timing tent, and i saw the afternoon races from the bottom course crossing because i was marshaling that corner, which means i had to stand there wearing a safety vest and if riders were visible on the course above me to the woods, i had to cut off pedestrian traffic at the crossing.

oddly, racers do not enjoy seeing pedestrians crossing the section of course they are entering at full speed. they really prefer to come through those curves before that jump without having to watch for people in their way.

so that was my job.

i didn't get to see a lot of the race in general, but i got to see every second of it from my little corner. happily i know the course well enough that i can imagine what these same riders look like as the announcer calls the action.

i have fewer pictures from the women's race than i do of the men's race because the women's race was the headline event and there was more crowd for me to have to control at the crossing. the women's race was also more heavily attended by world and national champions.

when you see a race with georgia gould, lea davison, and katerina nash in it, you are watching women you have seen on olympic courses and in world cup races.

and the thing about seeing the race at a venue like catamount is that you can stand right up close to these giants and talk to them.

it was super exciting for the local crowd, too, because lea davison is FROM here, as in she is from jericho, which means her mail comes out of the same post office mine does. and she had a slow start to
the season because of a hip surgery, but she managed to defend her national championship the week before and this was her first race with her new champion jersey ON THE HOME FIELD WITH HER GRANDMOTHER WATCHING!

and watching lea race is kind of a nail biter because if she CAN blow the legs off the field right out of the start she will, but mostly she has a habit of sitting right in with the lead group and making those girls in the front work hard to keep her behind them and then in the last lap -BAM- she drops them.

so for most of the race we don't know if she can't win it, or if she's just doing that thing she does.

so all the way around she was right behind katerina nash. sometimes it was just the two of them and sometimes georgia gould and chloe woodruff would join up and at one point the lead group had grown to six riders.

and then katerina nash went down in the rock garden. and right at the bell, davison took off the way she does and THE FANS WENT WILD.

after the race i heard katerina nash make a very graceful apology for that fall. i can't place her words exactly, but the gist of it was that she was not sorry for what it did to her own race, because she's a big girl and is responsible for her own day, but that she owed an apology to the other women who lost time because of her mistake.

she is a class act.


here's a little video of the men's race and some pictures of both the men's an women's elite races.

naptime

it is nine o'clock in the morning and time for my nap.

i slept all night, except for when i kept waking up thinking i'd slept for a day.

today i am thristy, hungry, and sleepy.

i'm taking this as a sign of fatigue.

the race was awesome. later on i'll tell you about it. right now i need a nap.

feeder

by the time this post publishes, i will be out on the racecourse.

did i mention that i am team captain? somebody has to be captain for some kind of paperwork purpose, but there's only two of us on the team.

my more important job is feeder.

did you know "feeder" is a thing? it totally is. in endurance racing you have to be careful to keep your food and water topped up because when you're burning that many calories for that many hours if you wait until you're hungry or thirsty it is way too late to continue your level of exertion well.

if you do enough endurance races, you will have an experience where you or someone on you know is standing crying in a corner store unable to move until she gets that special cupcake about which she has been fantasizing for the last four days and it's the only reason she made it the last hundred miles only thy;re out of the special cupcake and now someone has to talk her down.

feeder is the person who helps avoid this problem by making sure everybody has food and drink at proper intervals.

my philosophy about team feeding is that the team should have delicious and nutritious foods and also be surprised some.

so my teammate is getting her feed bag with some things she can see and some things she can't.

there's a little bag of logan breads. logan bread is a heavy backpacking bread made with a lot of sugars and whole wheat flour.

there's a bag of cracked pepper parmesan rosemary oatmeal cookies.

there are two soy sauce eggs.

and three mystery sandwich wraps. my teammate will not know what they are until she opens them:

turkey and swiss with fresh vegetables. honey mustard and just a tiny bit of currant jelly. mmm, secret sauce.

roasted sweet potato, roasted mushrooms, and caramelized onions.

szechuan peanut noodles, mushroom and carrot simmered in master sauce, and sweet and hot cabbage. it's weird and cross cultural, but these things actually are awesome wrapped in a tortilla. chinese dinner burrito. no kidding.

and in my pack i will be carrying two snickers bars and two packs of oreos because my teammate's favorite thing is oreos. when it's late in the day and we're tired and we have to carry the boat up some horrid hill will be a good time for me to tell her there are oreos.

coursework

tomorrow is race day.

i haven't been writing much about it because i've spent a lot less time worrying about it and a LOT less time course sleuthing. the race is being held out of the same geographic area as last year's,  so a lot of my guesses about where the course MIGHT go still apply.

last year because there were a limited number of ways to get in and out of catamount, i had a much better ability to guess where the course was going to run.

you can't know where the control points are going to be, obviously, and if you figure out the race is going into camel's hump state forest, that leaves a LOT of possibilities.

there are about a bazillion ways the race could come in and out of cochran's ski area.

for instance, it could go up into huntington or duxbury via into CHSF, which connects to the catamont trail and the came's hump xc ski area.

or it could start in the bolton valley parking lot and go up ricker mountain and then down the ridge or down into cotton brook. or it could start at waterbury state park and go up the east side of ricker and down the ridge.

if it comes down ricker, it positions the race really well for a rappel or a tyrolean traverse at either lower west or at the bolton quarry. and if it does that, the course is positioned really well to cross the river and return to cochran.

you want to see my last year's map? i didn't make a new one, but the redder an area is the more strongly i felt it would be on last year's course.

here's my list of probables:

very likely:

paddle on reservoir
ropes element at lower west or bolton quarry
bonus round at cochran

likely:

paddle on winooski to deforge power station, long portage.
ropes element at deforge
hike or bike on ricker in bolton ski area
hike or bike (cotton brook) on ricker in little river state park
hike in camel's hump state forest
bike on camel's hump ski area trails/catamount trail

less likely: paddle down little river, with portage.

for instance, one theoretical course could start in the parking lot at bolton valley, go over ricker by foot or bike, go down the other side of ricker by foot or bike, paddle the reservoir, take out and travel down to lower west on bike or on foot (depending on trail use or bushwhack). bike or foot travel to river crossing. the bridge hasn't been built yet, but there's a right of way and this time of year it's a short wade. that brings us back right about to cochran.

there are a lot of possibilities, though, so that's just one of many practical possibilities.

we'll find out when they give up the maps.