Well, it’s been a couple weeks since the Bellingham Traverse celebrated its ninth year. We’re just about finished putting our stuff away and cleaning up after ourselves. Big Thanks out to all of our volunteers and supporters that make this annual event possible. We ran really thin this year, and were able to pull off another successful event. Each year there are some opportunities to learn- this is another way of saying, “Mia Culpa”.

Mia Culpa- (aka, things I apologize for) For those of you who didn’t get a pint glass, I’m sorry: We had more people this year than we had anticipated and simply ran out of inventory. To the Trail Runners in Fairhaven Park (esp. the first teams through the woods), I’m sorry: We set the course too early this year, which alerted the homeless people that live back there that we were putting on a race in their living room. It seems that they didn’t want us back there so the course was sabotaged- even to the extent that there was debris on the trail when we went in Saturday morning to assess the diversions that we were aware had happened. To set the record straight, we did go in that morning and reset the course and it was methodically sabotaged again. We are assessing how we can utilize this space next year by rerouting and avoiding the camps. To those kayak owners whose boats got a bit scratched up at the end of the leg, I’m sorry: next year we hope to roll out a red carpet so we don’t have to put boats on the street.

The Results. Each year, we try our best to capture and deliver the split times for each person at each leg. We have developed our own system for capturing the data and have a great group of volunteers that do a great job of helping us with this. They all did a fantastic job this year. Unfortunately, the laptops that we borrowed to enter the data were a bit tired and has resulted in some challenges in posting the data. Scot Ranney has spent numerous volunteer hours troubleshooting the inconsistent records that we have and has made strides in providing the correct times. We thank all of the participants who have sent us notes with more information that has helped us figure out some of the anomalies  surrounding our entries. We are aware that the times for some of the legs are up to 12 minutes off and are trying to iron it out. IF YOU HAVE exact times for your leg, or each leg, please send them to us so we can enter them into our system and help round out this problem. Thank you all for your patience around the posting of your times. We’re doing our best.

If you haven’t looked or ordered your Photos from Brunk Photography, please do so- remember the good times!

Stay tuned to see where we’ll be Traversing in 2011!