The club put on a well-organized event with tons of new land to ride, with most of it virgin trail. Off-camber and undulating singletrack was the predominate theme for each of the six test sections.
The club raised the bar on execution and organization – They must have used 5000 BRIGHT ORANGE arrows (thanks Indiana!), check and road crews all wore color-matching shirts, chase vehicles had easily-identifiable tags, and VTR Enduro Chairman Craig Scott must have eaten a lot of pizza to get the special signage. It was pretty cool to have each section identified with the crew that helped lay it out – you knew exactly who to thank, or curse, depending on how your ride went.
Electronic scoring, provided by Michigan Off-Road Events, worked really well at this event, and there was a big improvement over the Jack Pine in getting scores posted quickly. It was nice not having to deal with scorecards, and although riders like being able to compare scores at resets, I didn't need to look at a piece of paper to know I was riding like a squid that day.
Cody Mastin took the Overall win, hammering the course relentlessly through each section, just edging out Jordan Mapes by 53 seconds for the day. Jesse Warner beat out 127 other riders for 3rd, and the Scharphorn’s, Ron & Richard, were freight-training all day on #33 to round out the top 5.
Overall B went to Martin Ryerson, fast-tracking his way to the A-class, and Overall C went to young (and future AA-rider) Talon Soenksen.
For the full check-by-check results, go to
www.d14enduro.org. And if you rode the event, tell the club what you liked and what you didn’t by filling out a quick rider survey:
->
www.surveygizmo.com/s3/995459/2012-Bark-Buster (survey closes 8/20)
P.S. The club is looking for any and all helmet-cam footage from the Bark Buster, so if you have some, please let them know.