Uphill Climb

As promised, more camp details...

The Sugarloaf Uphill Climb is well-named - basically, you climb up Sugarloaf as fast as you can. The course gains 3000 ft in 3 miles, with some ridiculously steep pitches - you spend most of the race walking unless you're a fool or a genetic freak. Bowdoin Nordic has generally shown pretty well at this event - Forrest won by a wide margin a couple years ago. No Forrest this time - he was in Texas doing something related to rocks - so seven of us represented Bowdoin in his stead: Sarah, Shem, Elissa, Tom, Niko, Walt, and myself. This time, Sarah provided the big highlight for our team, taking 2nd for women and handily beating all of the Colby competitors. We already knew that Sarah has great upper body power - now we know that she has a great motor as well. Two big pieces of the puzzle. On the men's side, our team was solid but well behind Colby's top guys. Colby has quietly become one of the best men's teams in the East, and beating them will take some doing - this race reaffirmed that. Fortunately, this was a foot race in October, not a ski race in February. All in all, a good, hard test of our early fitness.

After the race, we made our way over to Embden for an easy recovery rollerski before settling in for the night. Mike and Louise Gilmore were our benefactors for this trip - they have a camp on a beautiful slice of the Embden Pond shore, where they generously invited us to stay. We cooked a fine meal of pasta with pesto and other good stuff and then turned our attention to the real competition: poker and ping pong. Sarah turned out to be the big winner once again - turns out that the wholesome Alaskan thing is just a facade, because this girl knows her way around the poker table. She dominated the game - Ezra insisted on hanging on till the bitter end and was pretty much trounced for his efforts. The rest of us went to bed with pride intact.