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2016 Tombstone Trail
It was a dark and stormy night. The only thing missing from this classic Halloween event was Snoopy in his Sopwith Camel battling the Red Baron in the skies overhead. The stories they could tell, if only...
But wait! There are stories to tell. This was the Tombstone Trail, after all, and that's an event that creates stories by the dozen. Here are a few.
The event started on a moderately-cold, moderately-wet, gloomy evening in Cannon Falls, MN October 19, 2016. By the time the majority of the contestants hit the trail, the rain varied from drizzle to downpour. At least there was no lightning! The rains came and went all evening, being mostly a steady cold, mild soaking, tapering off as teams approached the endpoint in Faribault.
The format was like one we've used occasionally, where teams are given a series of photographs, and their task is to determine at which cemetery each photograph was taken. It's really tough at the first few cemeteries, because there are so many pictures to be considered, but it gets easier as the night unfolds and you are able to limit your possible answers through the process of elimination.
The cursing at the first cemetery could be heard all the way back at registration. It was a 3-pointer, meaning there were 3 pictures to identify. Since each picture could be answered at one of 3 cemeteries, at the first 3-point cemetery there are 9 pictures to be considered! Several teams abandoned that cemetery without finding all 3 pictures, which made their life more difficult in the coming hours. Those who solved it only had 8 to consider at the next cemetery, and so on.
The first 4-point cemetery was brutal, as well, with 12 pictures to consider! Additionally, it is a cemetery with a single tombstone. It's a big one (the tombstone), and visible from the parking lot, but many teams never found it, meaning that they then had to go to all three 4-pointers. Those who scored all four pictures at the first two 4-pointers got to skip the third, having solved it by elimination.
That cemetery caused a call from a Goodhue County Sheriff deputy. Not that there was anything going on at that one. On the contrary, the people who lived next door were showing the contestants where to find the tombstone! The problem was that some contestants were at the wrong cemetery, only a half mile away. Where they should have only had to find a no parking sign, they instead were wandering around a huge cemetery trying to find the location of 12 pictures that were not taken there! I assured the deputy that no mischief was taking place, and there were no cemeteries by churches that should have people in them. Those people were just lost.
Final-checking the event last weekend, my wife Vicki and I determined that it was possible, through the process of elimination, to solve every picture and score a perfect score in 3 hours and 15 minutes, only 15 minutes less than contestants were given. Virtually impossible for someone trying to study the rules and learn the tricks in the dark, in the rain, and being cold to boot. We fitgured the top score to be in the low 50's, out of 62 possible points. However, the Westbergs won the event overall for the second time with an amazing 59 points. Clarence drove and managed the GPS while Kate followed the map and worked on strategy. Gwen and Liz were the runners, searching the cemeteries for the answers.
The Utecht/Carlson/Cammack group, former winners themselves, was second overall, and the top placing non-GPS team, with an equally remarkable 58 points. The one point difference could easily be due to not having GPS, which helps more to quickly find the cemeteries than it does to score points. The added efficiency might just help you to get to one more cemetery during the night, though.
Class A was an epic battle between Nate and Lori Austin, and Nick Danger and Matt Baker, another set of former winners. They had identical scores on the road, and they each incurred a 1-point penalty for being a couple minutes late. Danger/Baker were winning the tiebreaker until Nate pointed out we had mis-counted his answers, so the class win went to the Austins in the end. Fortunately, we had an extra first-place trophy for the Austins to take home.
Class B produced another close match between the Stromgrens correctly answering 3 more points than the Bakers, but due to two wrong answers, the Stromgrens's winning margin was cut to a single point. Congrats to both teams on a job well done.
Class C was a more decisive victory and produced the best story of the weekend, and one that will be told for years to come. Will Volk's partner bailed out at the last minute, leaving Will without a navigator. At least one other team offered Will to ride with them, but he decided to try the event alone. It made me a little nervouse to think of him driving and reading the map alone in the rain in the dark, but he drives for a living and is used to handling it.
Obviously. Will scored an amazing 33 points by himself, on time and with no errors! We were so excited by his achievement we failed to notice it made him the class winner until doing an audit of the scores later. We're ordering another trophy to send to Will.
The other story that deserves to be recorded for all time is that of Christopher Spargo and Jamie Wanken. When we finished the scoring, there was one car missing - them. Their friends on other teams were trying to call and getting no response. One team reported seeing an unattended car matching the description of Chris's out on a township road. Chris has run the Tombstone Trail for years and usually does quite well, so his absence was a little concerning. Certainly he would call if he was in trouble and capable of calling.
The awards were done and people were starting to leave. One of Chris's friends was heading to the spot where his car may have been seen. Then Chris and Jamie walked in with their scorecard to check in. They swore they couldn't be an hour late because they were running off a trip timer in their BMW. Turns out that trip timer must not count when the car is off or something, so it accumulated less time than was really passing. They had a great score prior to the application of over an hour in lateness penalty!
This year wrong answers were deducted from your score, a rule that brutalized two teams. Heidi Lawson/Krista Poferl and Zachary Visker/Alexos McKinney both scored in the 30's, but both guessed at all their unanswered questions, resulting in huge deductions. An unfortunate but understandable misunderstanding by people running the event for the first time. Fortunately for Visker/McKinney, running in class D, for 2-person teams who have never run before, it still left them as the class winners!
Lawson/Poferl won a tie-breaker with the event's thee-generation team for the most highly-coveted of all Tombstone Trail awards, the Dead Last award. Granddaughter Tessa at the age of 8 is certainly one of the youngest Tombstone Trail trophy winners, and she left clutching that trophy in a way that left no doubt that mom Jessica and grandma Sue will have to fight over the other. Sue, by the way, was one of the three contestants who also competed on the original Tombstone Trail in 1978, the others being Clarence Westberg and Kate (nee Kaiser) Westberg. What a cool grandma!
Thanks to Vicki Larson and Alexis Anderson for all their help setting up, checking and working the event, and to JB and Brenda Lewis for their work on registration and scoring. It's a lot of pressure handling the scoring late at night when everyone's anxious to go home, but the team was great and got the scores out quickly as usual. Overall, it was a fun event and I think almost everyone had a great time. The Depot was a good ending spot and the staff was excellent.
Next year will be the 40th Tombstone Trail, and we're going to run it down in Fillmore County, where it all began. We found an old map from the early years where we went all the way to the Iowa border, and that's where we're going to run it in 2017. It will also be my 40th and last year as rallymaster, since I'll be 60 and it's time to turn the game over to the next generation. Several of the younger folks present last night expressed interest in taking the helm, and I'm pretty sure we'll know soon who will be taking us into 2018 and beyond.
Thanks to all involved for another great Tombstone Trail!
Mark Larson
Rallymaster
You can see the event results here.
Read the 2015 report.