The September Saturday Rally started in northwest Portland, followed Marine Drive along the Columbia River to Lewis and Clark Park, traveled along the Sandy River on the Historic Highway, crossed creeks in the Larch Mountain, Bull Run, and Wildcat Mountain areas, and finished up in Estacada. There was a mid-rally break at Shorty’s Corner east of Sandy. The 120-mile course took four hours to complete.

What the Rallymasters said:

Thank you for running the September rally, it was a pleasure to be involved in the planning.

You went up Larch Mountain and then out toward Marmot, a neat road I didn't even know was there until a few months ago.

I hope you enjoyed the lunch stop, Shorty's Deli has been very handy to me in the past returning from the mountain and it was cool to visit again.

Finally on south via McCabe to get into the hills east of Estacada for a couple loops.

The endpoint was some food carts, hopefully there were choices to your liking. Again, we appreciate your participation in our rally, we look forward to seeing you at Ghouls Gambol in October and hope your off season goes well.

The challenge

The rally included one navigational challenge, which was set up in these two route instructions:

56. S at WILDCAT MTN ONTO KLEINSMITH. CAST 35.

57. S at KITZMILLER OR PAUSE 15 seconds at "FRIENDS OF KLEINSMITH ROAD".

NRI 56 places you onto Kleinsmith, meaning that Kleinsmith is now the main road. (You cannot use an instruction to stay on the main road.)

The next intersection you come to is a sideroad on the right signed as Kitzmiller Road. The road straight ahead is Kleinsmith.

NRI 57 gives you a choice to either go straight at Kitzmiller or pause at a sign reading Friends of Kleinsmith Road. You can do one or the other but not both.

Can you go straight at Kitzmiller at this intersection? There is a sign identifying the sideroad on the right as Kitzmiller. But since to go straight would keep you on Kleinsmith which is the main road, you cannot use the instruction to go straight.

So you follow the main road straight through the intersection and continue to look for an opportunity to execute NRI 57. Almost immediately you encounter an Adopt-A-Road sign reading “Friends of Kleinsmith Road”, so you pause and mark NRI 57 as complete. Everyone goes straight; on course teams pause.

What ralliers said

Our rally story - We had not used the 2004 PT Cruiser in a rally since the 2009 season. I equate it to driving a VW beetle, easy cruising downhill and slow uphills. Each bump and each hill were our nemesis not even mentioning the turns (turning radius is horrid).

We somehow managed to get 3 zeros but overall we were either early or late in the double digits.

The PT itself didn’t like it either. At just over 90K miles it has developed squeaky brakes and a few other rattles. It definitely was not a smooth ride.

But we did the one challenge correctly even though we still got a late 12 on that leg.

Back to the hotel, I look over to the back folding seat and it had fallen down. “Must have been bumpy,” Dave said. “I’m glad it is over!”

We didn’t take any pictures except a selfie in the hotel parking lot.

One of these rallies we might have clearer weather that we can actually see the scenery everyone says is there.
(Dave and Kathy Sacry)     
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I did take pics while driving on the roads less traveled.

We love the milkshakes at Grannies in Estacada so I wrote that on the route instructions. Who knew?!

We brought our “A” game today!

Winning was just an extra joy to the day.

(David and JoAnn Gattman)

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Congratulations to the top finishers

First overall and first in the SOP class are David and JoAnn Gattman with a score of 63 over 24 scored legs.

Second overall and first Novice are Lee Nielsen and Chuck Winkler with a score of 110.

Third overall and second SOP are Cody and Sabrina Garvin with a score of 122.  Congratulations to all the finishers!

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Thank you for running the June 25, 2022 Cascade Sports Car Club Saturday rally. I have been a CSCC member off-again-on-again since 1987, and while I have written a number of rallies for the club, this is the first one I have written in a number of years.  

Before I say anything else, I would like to express gratitude to Monte and Victoria Saager, who have done an amazing job of revitalizing the Cascade rally program over the last few years. It is a lot of work to maintain the program to the current standards, and I would like to acknowledge their hard work and dedication.

I hope people enjoyed the route. It is getting tougher and tougher to find roads in less-developed areas; urban sprawl is wreaking havoc on once-ralliable roads. The course I chose is hardly original, but they are just some of my favorite rally roads for any one of a number of reasons.

The name of the rally, the Great Curve, is related to one of my absolute favorite all-time bands, the Talking Heads. I had a lot of instructions based on yellow warning signs, so “Warning Signs” was suggested as a name for the rally. I remember a relatively-recent rally (of course this could have been any time in the last ten years) named Warning Signs, so I rejected it. Talking Heads have a song called Warning Signs, so I thought it would be fun to have a Talking Heads song title as the name of the rally. I discarded “Road to Nowhere”, since the rally went somewhere. Likewise, I passed “This Might Be the Place” since there wasn’t really a place. So I settled on “The Great Curve”, off the great album “Remain in Light.” Lyrically the song has nothing to do with my rally, but I thought “The Great Curve” might have some relevance to any of the many fun corners on the rally.

Philosophically I am personally not a big fan of trap rallies, I prefer tours and trying to be on time without losing the route. I like to think I kept this course as a simple event, but sometimes it is nice to have some basic challenges. I like to think of this June rally as simple for course-following, but perhaps a bit more challenging to stay on time. I kept checkpoints to a relative minimum, and I tried to make the control locations a bit unpredictable.

There were a few simple “challenges” (once called traps), but most of them were based on the main road determinants (as always, be familiar with the Cascade General Instructions, Section 3 (Main Road Determinants)). The MRDs are fundamental to good performances on the CSCC rallies, and understanding of these MRD concepts is of paramount importance.

The only challenge on this event that I thought might be a bit difficult was NRI 56. From the instruction it looked like you might need two “SPEED 40” signs, but ultimately it turned out you needed four. The first “SPEED 40” occurred at a mileage before the official mileage, so should not have been considered. The second “SPEED 40” was, in the context of the instructions, the first “SPEED 40”. After that you were looking for the second “SPEED 40,” which was not the third “SPEED 40”, but rather the fourth “SPEED 40.” Sound confusing? Then good, that is what I was hoping for.

Shortly after that was my favorite road of the rally, Trout Creek Road. I hope you enjoyed that uphill climb, with lots of twists and turns.

I would like to congratulate the winners, Madelyn and Mark Tabor. I know this is the first TSD rally win for Madelyn (Mark’s daughter), but I believe it is also the first overall TSD win for papa Mark, who has been playing this game for a number of years. It was a great fight for the win, with 15 seconds separating between the top three teams in the SOP class.

It was fun to watch the battle develop live between the Tabor team and Cody and Sabrina Garvin, who were rarely separated by more than a few seconds. It was a first for me, but is really cool to use the Richta Rallymaster app and watch cars live on Google Maps, with live scoring, as the rally went through its 22 checkpoints. Congratulations to both teams (Tabor/Tabor, Garvin/Garvin) on fantastic performances.

Dave and JoAnn Gattman were not far behind these teams, finishing just 13 seconds behind the Garvins, so a tip of the hat to them. Alas regular SOP-class winners Marcus and Kerrie Gattman had a rare off day, and for once were not on the pace.

Congratulations also for our first Novice team, Lee Nielsen and Chuck Winkler in their Audi. The rally had some tough going for the team, but they persevered for a good Novice class win.

I am sorry that things didn’t work out at the ending location. This was a surprise to me, brought to my attention at the Friday night Zoom meeting. I would like to encourage people to patronize Kissin’ Kates and the Beavercreek Saloon, the food there is quite tasty. Every other Thursday night they have all-you-can-eat fried catfish, and it is really, really good.

I would like to thank again the folks that hauled me around while I scrawled instructions: Merrilee Gilley, John Elkin, and Brian Gottlieb. Of course this would not have been possible without the amazing assistance of Monte and Victoria Saager, who helped in so many ways.

Thanks again for your participation in the June CSCC rally. I hope you join us again for the next Cascade rally on July 23.

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Eighteen teams ran the second rally in the 2022 Saturday Rally Series on April 16. All 18 were Cascade member entries. Go team!

About the rally

The April Saturday rally course was 96 miles long and took just under three and a half hours to drive.

Starting in northwest Portland, the rally crossed the Willamette River twice, first on the top deck of the Marquam Bridge and then back over the river on the Fremont Bridge, continuing north to end the odometer check on Sauvie Island.

After a trip around the island, the course climbed up McNamee Road and continued north on Skyline to Rocky Point Road.

Following the scenic descent down Rocky Point Road and a short transit up the highway, rally teams followed Dutch Canyon west of Scappoose into the hills, eventually reaching the Yankton area.

Ralliers were treated to a break at the Yankton Store and Restaurant. The Yankton School and the historic Yankton Grange were nearby locations. After a tour of the Yankton’s rolling hills and farmland, the route wound along backroads leading back to Scappoose where the rally ended at Fultano’s Pizza.

Challenges

This rally included six challenges. The first was a spelling trap. A route instruction directed you to pause at a sign reading Eliot ITIS (if there is such). We have fun referencing this sideroad off of Skyline because at one end of the road, the name is signed as Elliot and the other end is signed as Elliott. Either way, the road is not signed Eliot, so the correct action was to skip this ITIS instruction and its penalty pause.

The second challenge was a number switch. The rules say you must execute numbered route instructions in numerical order. In this case, two route instructions were switched in order. If you correctly executed them in numerical order you avoided the speed reduction which caused you to be late at the next checkpoint.

The third challenge was a note to reduce your speed at a sign reading hidden driveway. (BTW this sign is the source of the title of this event, quoting a line from the song My Private Idaho.) The note is introduced a few instructions before the break but isn’t used until after the break. The challenge was to just remember you had a note in effect. But read on.

A note is an unnumbered instruction that is active from its introduction until it is canceled. Think of it as a “floating” instruction that you execute every time the opportunity presents itself, while you’re still following the numbered route instructions. This rally had two notes. The first, Note A, gets introduced and you use it once after the break as mentioned above.

The second note, Note B, gets introduced just after the break:

Introduce Note B: PAUSE 15 seconds at second “DART”. Cancel Note B. Cancel Note A.

The intent is that you cancel Note B as soon as you execute it. You see the second sign reading Dart and you cancel Note B. So if the note is no longer in effect after it has been canceled, then you can’t continue executing it, thus blocking the canceling of the first note. Of course the reference for the first note rolls around again soon after and you have the opportunity to execute the first note a second time - which you correctly do. Teams that believed the first note was canceled along with the second note did not execute the speed change associated with the second occurrence of the first note, thus earning them a penalty.

Then there was an OR instruction:

PAUSE 15 seconds at SASQUATCH OR “PERRY CR”

Do the half of the instruction before the OR or do the half after the OR, but not both, whichever comes first. The trick is to make you think you’re supposed to pause for either half, whichever is first. And even though there is a full-size cutout figure of a sasquatch along the route, it didn’t have an identifying sign, so it didn’t count anyway. Long and short of this one is that you correctly saw the Perry Cr sign and did not pause for the penalty.

The last opportunity to earn penalty points on challenges was an ITIS instruction offering a pause to go left on a named road. At the apparent location, the named road appears as a sideroad on the left. However, the road straight ahead is marked no outlet. Since you can only proceed in one direction (left) without u-turning, there is no intersection here. Since the instruction is to go L (left) and L is a deviation and a deviation can only occur at an intersection, the correct action is the skip the ITIS instruction and its penalty pause.

None of these challenges had much penalty associated with them, 15 points or less for incorrectly executing the challenge. With 24 scored legs, staying on time and being on time at checkpoints determined the winners.

What the rallymasters said

This rally traveled on roads very familiar to the rallymasters. The route through Yankton passed Victoria’s grandfather’s ranch where her father and two uncles grew up. Both Monte and Victoria learned to drive on these roads. These roads have been on rally routes many times before. We enjoyed working on this rally and we enjoyed driving this rally route.

We did have a couple of interesting experiences while writing this rally.

When we were measuring and setting GPS checkpoints, Monte told me that the next checkpoint we were looking for was a sign reading consign. I’m driving along thinking, I don’t remember a sign like that out here on this remote road. Just about then, we passed a sign displaying a graphic of a cow. I have a particular fondness for pictorial signs, especially animals, so I say, “Hey, there’s a cow sign.” Hmmm…

So then I asked him to look back at the last draft copy of the route instructions from our prior drive through. He opens the clipboard and sees in his own hand-writing the word “cowsign”. Yeah, I think that was the sign we were looking for. As it turned out, that section of the rally route got deleted from the final event.

During the rally checkout on the Saturday prior to the event, our progress was halted by a herd of cows in the road. We’ve encountered sheep, chickens, even peacocks in the road before, but this was our first cow herd encounter. We were trying to drive on rally time, using the app to make sure the checkpoints worked, so a time allowance was definitely required. When the road cleared, Monte “Mr. Rally” told me how much TA to enter, which earned us a single-digit score. How does he do that?!

What ralliers said

Thank you. It was fun. My mom and I did pretty well for my second time and her first since 50 years ago 😁. Here is a pic from the drive home going back on Rocky Point.

Good event. Loved the views. Wish we had less traffic at Yankton. When we hit the break there was chaos and we didn't note our arrival time, so we were guessing on our out time.

Thank you very much for the emails. We got discouraged when we couldn’t find the "T" and thought we went the wrong way. Thank you for watching over us. This was a great first event for us. We have many questions and an idea for how to prepare for the Mountains to the Sea Rally :)

Fun run! Thanks for all your work. See ya next time.

Thank you, another great rally!!!!!

Congratulations to the top finishers

First overall and first in the Equipped category was the team of Bob Morseburg and Cheri Eddy with a total score of 90 over 23 scored legs.

Second overall and first in the SOP class was the team of Cody and Sabrina Garvin with a score of 116.

Third overall and second SOP was the team of Brian and Jamie Anderson with a score of 121.

Fourth overall and first in the Novice class was the team of Lee Nielsen and Chuck Winkler with a score of 138.

Congratulations to all!

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Twenty-one teams ran the first rally in the 2022 Saturday Series on March 19. Competition was close, especially among the 13 entries in the SOP class. Of the five Novice teams, two were first-timers. And twenty of the entries were Cascade members. Go team!

About the rally

The March Saturday rally course was 94 miles long and took about three hours to drive. It started in northwest Portland and went south to end the odometer check at Willamette Park in West Linn. After meandering across North Wilsonville, the route traveled through the Ladd Hill area and along Parrett Mountain Road to the mid-rally break at the Johnson Landing County Park in Newberg. After the break, the rally headed south through St. Paul and east to end in Woodburn.

What ralliers said:

Great rally. New sights. Super fun!

Thanks for hosting the rally today! It was a delightful day!

It was a great rally! Thank you!

Thanks for the fun!

Thank you for the assist. I’m not sure we would have ever hit it right even on the return. Went from an awesome rally for us to a good rally. Still fun even though we couldn’t figure out what we did wrong until your correction. [This from a team who was getting mostly single-digit scores until they missed a turn and wandered off the edge of rally land. We saw them on the Richta Rallymaster Map and phoned them, got them turned around and back on the rally, with only one bad leg score to show for it.]

Challenges

This rally included a few simple challenges. The first was an ITIS (if there is such) instruction which contained a pause.  Ralliers who forgot they were placed ONTO a road in the previous instruction might have incorrectly used the ITIS to follow the ONTO. But even if they refused that chance, they had another opportunity at the very next intersection. The correct action was to skip the ITIS instruction (and its penalty pause) and just stay on the ONTO named road.

The next challenge was also a main road challenge, at an intersection where the main road was determined by protection (back-facing yield sign). On course teams recognized the protected intersection and refused the first half of an OR instruction, instead executing the speed change in the second half. Off course teams used the first half of the OR instruction, so they missed a vital speed change, earning themselves a penalty.

The third challenge was a mileage trap. A route instruction directed teams to “watch for trucks for a half mile.” The instruction after that was a speed change at a 30 mph sign.  Teams who failed to wait the entire half mile before looking for the next instruction changed speed too soon and earned a penalty. On course teams drove by a 30 mph sign before the half mile was over and correctly waited until the next 30 mph sign after the half mile before changing their speed.

The last challenge offered an ITIS instruction to go left at an intersection with a particular sign. You come to what appears to be a T intersection and the referenced sign is there. But the road on the right has a dead end sign. So you can’t use the ITIS instruction there. Why? Because the instruction tells you to go left (L) but you can only go L at an intersection and there is no intersection there because there is only one choice for continuing without u-turning and the Road Rally Rules say, “An intersection is any joining of rally roads from which the contestant could legally proceed in more than one direction without U-Turning.” Whew!

That may sound like a lot of challenges, but they affected only four of the 20 scored legs. The road to TSD rally success is mostly about accurate driving and precise time keeping.

Congratulations to the top finishers

First overall and first in the Equipped category was the team of Bob Morseburg and Cheri Eddy with a total score of 93.  Second overall and first in the SOP class was the team of David and JoAnn Gattman with a score of 101. Third overall and second SOP was the team of Cody and Sabrina Garvin with 107 points. Honorable mention goes to the team of Marcus and Kerrie Gattman with 108 points.

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Click here for Rally Results