Street Scramble and Night & Day News

Check here for the latest info on Night & Day and Street Scramble. For press coverage of our events, see Press.

Saturday, April 1, 2006: Today we updated our Active.com registration system to help you save more money. (1) You can now purchase a discounted series pass for the first four Scrambles. (2) You can now register an entire team at once for any individual Street Scramble, saving on processing fees. (3) You can now register two solo adults at once for any individual Street Scramble, again saving on processing fees.

We were unable to obtain safety yellow T-shirts this year. Therefore we are rescinding the requirement that all participants wear either a safety yellow T-shirt or an orange mesh safety vest. However, we do have the vests available and all participants, especially our faster participants, are strongly encouraged to wear them. We plan to require safety-wear in 2007.

Our Seattle area season opener is in just three weeks! Hope to see you there.

&ndash Terry

Friday, January 27, 2006: As of today, all of our websites are updated for our exciting 2006 season!

Street Scramble: We're starting off the year with our first ever Street Scramble in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Millbrae Street Scramble. After that we have a rich slate of Street Scrambles in the Seattle area: four before Night & Day, and two after, including a Christmas season Street Scramble suggested by frequent participant Brian Crawford. And, once again, the four early Scrambles will be considered a championship series.

Night & Day: Just like last year, we're putting on this epic urban adventure in San Francisco in June, and in Seattle in July – with all new checkpoints, of course.

Street Scramblers will see a couple changes from last year. We're splitting the Veteran competition into three classes: Veteran Women, Veteran Men, and Mixed Veteran. In the Seattle area, we're adding a new Corporate competition class. And we're introducing a requirement that all Scramblers wear safety orange or safety yellow, either a vest or a T-shirt, to increase visibility.

We are still looking for expertise with Scantron machines.

– Terry

Tuesday, October 4: We're gearing up for our 2006 season. Most of the dates and places are now set. We'll be organizing Night & Day Challenge in both San Francisco (June 3-4) and Seattle (July 22-23) again. We'll have four or five Street Scrambles in the Seattle area in the spring. We'll return to the U-District on April 22, and to Crossroads on May 27. After that, we plan to explore Everett in June and Ballard in July. And we'll probably have another March season opener, in an as-yet-to-be-finalized locale.

Since attendance keeps growing, we need to increase the efficiency of our results processing. Does anybody have any experience with Scantron machines for the automatic scoring of mark-sense forms? If so, please contact us. There are many such machines for sale on eBay, but I don't know the first thing about them.

An exciting addition to our schedule for 2006 is one or two Street Scrambles in the San Francisco Bay Area We're looking at Millbrae, my home town, for October, and possibly another Street Scramble in November.

Tuesday, June 28: Some tidbits:

• A few Crossroads Bellevue photos have been posted on the results page. Follow the link to Lori Photography for many more.
• Team Baltic Vikings has posted its San Francisco Night & Day Challenge race report on the Night & Day results page. We are working on entering route data for the San Francisco Night & Day Challenge so you can compare your route with others'. Check back around July 8.
• We have finally and definitely nailed down our event center for this Saturday's Uptown Street Scramble -- it will be at Uptown Neighborhood Center, at 157 Roy St., just north of Seattle Center. If you will be driving to the event, plan time to find parking in the neighborhood. The checkpoints are all set and waiting for you, giving you a chance to explore Uptown, Queen Anne hill, the waterfront, and more.
• In Seattle, our end-of-season party will take place on Tuesday, July 12 at 7:30 p.m. at Woodland Park, picnic shelter #2, just off 50th St. Our Street Scramble series championship awards will be presented there at 8:00. Bring beverages; we will provide some snacks. All Street Scramble and Night & Day participants, from this year and years past, are invited to attend.
• The deadline for discounted registration for the July 16 Seattle Night & Day Challenge has been extended through July 4. Register by July 4 and save $10 on the 7-hour and 16-hour options. You don't have to be a hardcore fanatic to choose these options. Go at your own pace, plan a dinner stop, and have a great long adventure seeing the city as day passes through the long summer dusk and into night.

Monday, June 13: Eighty-nine teams comprising 208 individuals participated in this past weekend's San Francisco Night & Day Challenge. Provisional results have just been posted. The weather was sunny and mild, and people seem to have enjoyed the course. We heard reports of wildlife sightings in the Marin Headlands, bonfires at Ocean beach, somewhat frightening Ingleside nightlife, and nice views from Potrero Hill.

We are looking for someone to enter into a spreadsheet the times that each team visited each checkpoint. This will allow us to recreate everyone's routes and compare them with one another. We will post the spreadsheet on the web. Once this is accomplished, we will return your answer sheet to you if you send a stamped, self- addressed envelope to SFND c/o Terry Farrah, 4215 Whitman Ave. N #102, Seattle, WA, 98103.

Participants: we encourage all of you to write up reports of your experiences that we can share from this site. Sharing experiences is a big part of the fun of this event. It's best for us if you can create your report as a web page that we can link to. Second best is a Word document.

Monday, May 30: Nikolay Nachev has written Team BG's Scramble report.

Lori Photography took many very nice photos at Saturday's Street Scramble, including photos of route planning, checkpoint 54 (the metal sculpture), checkpoint 55 (the train marker), and the finish at the front entrance of the shopping center. One hundred fifteen of the photos are posted on their website, where you can order prints. The photography is beautiful.

Sunday, May 29:

Beautiful weather and lots of new Scramblers at yesterday's Crossroads Bellevue Street Scramble. Many thanks to Lynn Terpstra, Ellen Cooksley, and Ron Sher of Crossroads Bellevue for funding the Scramble and helping us set it up. And a gigantic thank you to Lyn Smith, who designed the course, directed on the day of the event, and served as our liason with Crossroads Bellevue. Check out team Teriyaki Donut's Scramble report. Results will be posted tonight or tomorrow morning.

As fast as we refine our results system, you guys keep overloading it by showing up in ever greater numbers! Yesterday's event drew a record-breaking 203 Scramblers. What would really help is if the same person were in charge of registration and results at every Street Scramble. As event directors, Eric, Lyn and I need to put our attention elsewhere during the event. If you're a non-Scrambler, a good typist, and enjoy working with spreadsheets, you may want to volunteer for this satisfying job, which I would sincerely love to do myself if I could. There are only two events left in our season – Uptown and Night & Day – so a results volunteer could see how that went and choose after that whether to continue in 2006. Our goal, which is surely achievable with the proper organization, is to have award ribbons prepared 25 minutes after each Scramble finish.

– Terry

Friday, May 27: We're all set to go for our first Street Scramble in the city of Bellevue, tomorrow at Crossroads shopping center. Visit our Crossroads Details page if you haven't already. We hope Seattle residents will overcome their Eastside aversions to check out this rich, ethnically diverse neighborhood. Saturday morning bridge traffic should be a breeze.

We have added more details about San Francisco Night & Day Challenge on the page now entitled SF-specific Info. The checkpoints are nearly finalized; a team of five from the Bay Area Orienteering Club is out vetting the course this weekend.

Negotiations are now underway for an event center for the Uptown Street Scramble; we are hoping to base it at Uptown Neighborhood Center.

We are now thinking about our 2006 event calendar. We've had a few requests for Street Scramble locations, including Ballard, Renton, and Puyallup. If I had the time and web savvy, I'd set up a page where people could vote on next year's locations. We've also had requests for Bay Area Street Scrambles. I'm tempted to put some on, even though our schedule is already so packed that it sometimes seems everything's hanging together by a thread! One thing we will not do in 2006: Night & Day Challenge in other cities. We're going to stick to our two home bases for now.

Sunday, May 8: Due to our primitive web maintenance protocol, Eric and I accidentally overwrote each other's edits to the U-District Scramble results. So there was nearly a week when the scores marked "Final" included old scores that we knew were wrong. We think we got it sorted out, but check out both your Scramble score and your series standings to be sure we got it right. Specifically, I just removed the Torrs from the lead in the standings ... Team BG is the actual leader at this point, due to an additional 50 points we had failed to count on event day.

Here is the route taken by The Torrs at U-District.

Thursday, May 5: I went and visited our San Francisco Night & Day event center today. The gardener had just planted the flower boxes. I had never actually explored Noe Valley before. Lots of cool shops and cafes on 24th Street that you might want to check out. Parking is not as copious as I'd previously thought; plan to walk a few blocks to Douglass Playground. Also, the park is lacking in bench and table space, but there is a huge grassy field. For course planning, you may wish to bring a big picnic blanket to sit on and a piece of cardboard or masonite to lay your maps on.

New Street Scramble series standings have just been computed by Scramble volunteer John Zobel. John's team, The Torrs, is leading the Men's Foot class (though by a very slim margin) – does this explain his zeal for maintaining the standings? Because the design of the Northshore course made it harder to accumulate points than at a typical Scramble, Northshore scores were multiplied by a scaling factor of 1.2.

Our Crossroads Bellevue Street Scramble is coming up at the end of this month. Crossroads management is very enthused about the Scramble and is supporting us with cash, catering, and by providing the mall as an event center. The City of Bellevue is creating several large banners to hang throughout the Crossroads area. It's really great to see community support building for our events!

As our event attendance grows, so does our need for volunteers. Many thanks to all nineteen members of the Cascade Orienteering Club who helped out at the Safeco U-District Street Scramble. Cascade will not be providing as many volunteers at Crossroads, so if you love our events, please consider volunteering. We especially appreciate volunteers who are not participating in the Scramble. However, participants can help, too, with set-up, registration, awards, and tear-down. We also offer early start times to volunteers, if desired. Everyone who volunteers for 1.5 hours or more receives a coupon good for free entry at that Scramble or a future Scramble, or $15 off Night & Day, or a free Night & Day T-shirt. Coupons are good through 2006, and are transferable to anyone who's never done a Street Scramble before.

– Terry

Thursday, April 28: Check out this Scramble report by team Teriyaki Donut.

Monday, April 25: We had gorgeous weather Saturday for the Safeco U-District Street Scramble, and a record-breaking turnout of 172 Scramblers. We welcome tales of your adventures, including the routes that you took. Send us text, images, and/or links, and we'll do our best to post them here.

Wednesday, March 30:

• Scramble series standings have been posted (thanks to John Zobel for computing them).
• Check out team Teriyaki Donut's Northshore Scramble report.
• Thirteen teams are now registered for San Francisco Night & Day Challenge. A number of teams have signed up for Seattle as well; look for them to be posted in the coming days.
• Look for our Safeco U-District Street Scramble banner hanging over the Ave, just above 45th St.

Sunday, March 27: We were blown away by the attendance at yesterday's Northshore Street Scramble. In March weather that was cold and rainy even by Pacific Northwest standards, 83 folks came out for Street Scramble, and 36 kids for Easter Egg Scramble. We are sorry to say that because we underestimated you, we under-printed our color maps and under-recruited volunteers, creating various delays. Thanks for bearing with us! We hope you enjoyed exploring the north end of Lake Washington.

Today, along with posting Northshore Results, we're adjusting our website color scheme. Thanks to Joyce L. for lending her web design skills!

– Terry

Thursday, March 17: Our season opener, Northshore Street Scramble, will be extra special because it is designed by our guest course designer, Bob Reddick. Bob has a great sense of fun and has included four refreshment checkpoints plus the option of taking a private ferry between two checkpoints! After the Street Scramble we will present Easter Egg Scramble, a scramble just for kids that stays in the park and offers prizes for all. We hope you can join us Saturday, March 26.

I wish I were going to be there, but except in the summer my home is in San Francisco and I can only spend so much money on plane tickets to Seattle! I'll be up for the Safeco U-District Street Scramble, though, and then again for Uptown and Seattle Night & Day Challenge.

Speaking of Night & Day, the course design work is coming along very well here in the city by the bay. Guest designer Vladimir Gusiatnikov has just completed the Marin portion of the course. He has made great use of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, providing a nice non-urban change of pace. Those of you planning to do S.F. Night & Day by bike will have to think carefully about your bike and tires, balancing the desire for speed on city streets with the need for fat tires on the mountainous trails of Marin.

In 2003 and 2004 this page was my blog. This year I am so very busy putting on our biggest-ever calendar of events that I have not had the energy to share all our little triumphs and tragedies on this page. Also, the last two years we had a different web design by wizard Stephen Madson that allowed me to blog with less hassle.

Not only are we offering four Scrambles and two Night & Days this year, we are also starting a little adventure race series in the Seattle area: BEAST. If you're an adventure racer, you'll enjoy this short races -- 1.5 to 2 hours winning time -- close to the urban centers, on weeknights. If you haven't adventure raced before, this is a great opportunity to try it out.

– Terry