It’s 5 AM on Saturday and I’m done preparing for the Klondike, meaning depending on how you define it, this is the earliest or latest I’ve finished.  Latest as I’ve never planned on getting less than 4 hours of sleep and earliest because I never really finished preparing for the previous 2.  Sure I’d have my car packed with stuff but did I have the unit sign-in checklist?  No.  Did I have the detailed station instruction sheet for all 20 stations?  No.  This year I do, so I suppose I’m 24 months late for completing my first Klondike.

A Klondike more so than most events is a thousand tiny things as my checklist for the event is two pages in its short form and six pages in its expanded form but this degree of microtracking is largely an effort to find the ephemera that has made these events so enjoyable to me as a teenager.  I use the term teenager specifically as I couldn’t remember ever enjoying them when I was 12 or younger and since I turned about 22 they’ve been a grind.  The Klondike Derby is a showcase each year of a dozen novel program snippets that units can take back as stations are rotated through by both sleds and time and this was a mechanic that was new to such things that I’m proud to say I have added.  The total corpus of stations is about 60 of which 45 are usable (some have never and should never see the light of day).  I wonder if it’ll last past me.

I can fit the entire Klondike in my Matrix this year where last year I had my dad’s GMC Sierra bed nearly full.  Better packing or different program?  I don’t know but this year I get to bring back sled raising, and for this I am excited.