2019 Tombstone Trail

2019 was the first time I actually got to compete on the Tombstone Trail. The event was preceded by The Great Pumpkin rally, on which I competed in 1976 and 1977. In 1978, I started the Tombstone Trail, and have worked on it every year until this year, when I ran it for the first time. So this report is my impressions as a competitor, rather than as an organizer.

Our plan had been for my wife Vicki and me to run the event with our grandchildren, but none of them could make it this year, so it was just the two of us. The weather was awesome this year, dry and cool, but not cold. We picked the earliest start time, so we were the first team on the road. Rallymaster Liz Westberg had sent out the general instructions ahead of time, so we had a good handle on the rules before we started. We were running in the GPS class, where we were given GPS waypoints to every cemetery. Vicki and I spent about 15 minutes in the parking lot at the start, studying the course and the questions, and making some notes on the map.

It was farther from the start point in Faribault to the end point in Hampton than just about any Tombstone Trail before, so we knew that in order to minimize the driving time we needed to gather as many points as we could at each cemetery. Cemeteries each had between 1 and 5 questions, and every question was worth the same number of points. We figured that if we spent an hour driving, we'd have about 2 hours in the cemeteries. If we could average 5 minutes per question, we'd score about 24 points. But more importantly, if a cemetery would take more than 5 minutes driving for every point we'd collect, it wouldn't be worth the driving time to go there.

We circled all the 4- and 5- point cemeteries on the map, as well as what we called the "drive by" cemeteries, where it was likely you could answer the questions without even going into the cemetery. That gave us a basic route that should be doable in 3 hours. Along the way, if there were 2- or 3-point cemeteries within reach, we'd try to get them, too.

We had agreed that if we spent more than 5 minutes per question, we'd give up that cemetery and move on. That was a trick I had learned from winning competitors in previous years when I was the rallymaster.

Other teams took off immediately after receiving their scorecard at their official start time, so there was already a car at the first cemetery, a small 1-pointer at the poor farm cemetery that I knew would be an easy score, and just within reach of our 5-minute rule. By the time we got to the second cemetery, there were already several cars there, and we met at least one already leaving as we approached the gate. Liz had given us maps at some of the larger cemeteries, and we totally misread the map, wasting a lot of precious time and going way over our 20-minute limit for the 4 questions.

From there we settled down a bit, and stuck with our plan. It was tough bailing on a question when we felt like we were only a minute or two from finding it, but by doing it we were able to get to 12 cemeteries. The number of cemeteries scored was to be the tiebreaker, and 12 turned out to be enough for us to win a 3-way tie.

We picked up enough 2- and 3-point cemeteries that we didn't have time at the end to pick up the 3 drive-by's in Cannon Falls, but we got both of the 2-point drive-by's south of town. As we headed for the end-point Vicki read all the unanswered questions, and since there was no penalty for wrong answers, we guessed at the ones that had reasonably obvious guesses, scoring 1 point from the 5 or 6 guesses.

We ended up with 27 points from our 12 cemeteries, slightly better than our original estimate. Vicki was a little disappointed in our performance, but I thought that it was pretty good for 2 people in their 60's. It was good enough for 2nd place in our class, but also 5 points less than the class winners, Nick Shamla and Kevin Scheible, who scored at 15 cemeteries! They either had a better strategy than us, were better at finding things in the dark, or both.

All the class winners were in the top 5 overall, and they all got to more cemeteries than us except for the class AA winners Shaun and Dana Sapala, who scored 34 points at only 11 cemeteries! Shaun and Dana have been really good at this game for a long time, and about the only thing they haven't won is first overall.

That honor went to Michele and Andrew Stromgren who scored an amazing 40 points at 15 cemeteries! However, they were a few minutes late to the endpoint and suffered a 5-point penalty, leaving them with 35 points for the overall win. Even more impressive is that Michele and Andrew won the event for the third time in a row, something that's never before been done on the Tombstone Trail. Watch for an epic Stromgren-Sapala battle in 2020.

Thanks so much to Liz for taking over this event and carrying on the tradition. I'm very proud of the effort she's put in and the results she's achieved. Thanks also to her mom Kate and her sister Gwen, who helped with precheck, registration, and scoring. You ladies put on a great event, and Vicki and I can't wait to run it again next year.

Mark Larson

You can see the event results here.

Read the 2018 report.