National Toboggan Championships, Day One, Part One

Another beautiful day in coastal Maine, and teams from all over New England gathered at the Camden Snow Bowl for the first qualifying runs of the National Toboggan Championships. The lightweight two-person and middleweight three-person runners went first, which left us heavyweight four-person crews to drill in the parking lot and pose for photos:

Why real estate is so expensive in these parts

The chute

3/4 of our team with the Trunk Monkey

The controversial rope (more on this later)

Mentally running the chute

The Allen's Coffee Dandies
Calamity struck on our first run: we we forced to shed our tensioning ropes while in the chute house, and a hurried remount of the toboggan meant that we were off center and not settled and tilted left when we hit the chute. As a consequence Mike and Brian rode the wall all the way down (melting Brian's pants: we in the back were wondering what the smell was) and I bounced off the chute myself on a couple of occasions. Even so, we managed a 9.11 second run- without the disasterous wall bumping we would have been up the leader board. No matter: tomorrow's run will be better and the judges take the best of both times, not a combined, so we are still in shooting distance of the finals. Wish us luck. Go fightin' 358th!