John was the tech-in-the-tree for the work climb which is why he was able to get such good shots of the guys riding up. He was one of the judges in the final event so I took those two pics (the tree and the first guy fixin' to go up). The camera only had digital zoom and that one closeup, the second of the two I shot, shows why it's better than nothing but still not as desirable as true optical zoom. In the one with me in it, you can see I'm working on getting some sun on my legs and some meat on my bones, hahaha!
It kind of sucks that the day ended like it did. The three semi-finalists opted to work the tree in the order they'd finished; 1st 1st, 2nd 2nd, and 3rd 3rd. The first guy lost a little time getting his line set but was pretty impressive nonetheless. As it turns out, he was the only one of the three to complete the event. The second guy up had a contrary saw which unscabbarded itself on him after the first station, and the third guy wasn't able to get his line set within the allotted number of attempts.
I can understand a DQ for losing equipment, but I can't figure out why there's a hard limit of 5 attempts setting the line. Seems to me that once you run out of possible points for that the only penalty should be getting no points for that phase. I've got a copy of the score sheet, though not in front of me at the moment, but I don't recall seeing anything on it regarding number of attempts at any of the in-tree stations.
For myself I'm a little disappointed in that I didn't get to see any of the finalists' work climbs, so didn't get to see the 2nd and 3rd place finishers strut their stuff in the tree. I can only imagine their frustration with the way things came out in the end.
It was an absolutely beautiful day. Maybe a little too much standing water around the place, with a little mud underfoot in the footlock area. And maybe a little too cool for a while in the morning. But it was sunny and there was just the slightest, really steady breeze.
Here's a zip file of everything snapshotted (3/8 size, stripped of profile data [John, your camera thinks yesterday was April 24, 2003 and the clock is about 9 hours slow], sharpened, and I forget how I changed the quality factor). 1.3 megabytes, more or less.
