Winter Wildcat 2026: "Are You Guys Lost?"

There's a thing that should legally disqualify you from a navigation race: getting lost on the drive to the start line. I'd love to tell you I didn't do that. I can't.

The Winter Wildcat is Mark Lattanzi's two-day rogaine - ten hours of map-and-compass checkpoint hunting each day, no GPS allowed - up at the Summit Bechtel Reserve, the Boy Scouts' sprawling mountain complex outside Glen Jean, West Virginia. HQ was the Gene H. Yamagata Lodge, which a ramshackle map on the event page loosely promises is "sort of a hotel" somewhere up the mountain. The roads up there wind, Google Maps is no help, and I took enough wrong turns that I finally pulled into a cafeteria full of people who were very much not racers and asked a kind cafeteria lady for directions. She knew there was a race happening somewhere on the mountain. She pointed. (That breakfast spot - where I stopped to ask directions TO the start, which is not a sign of a strong day ahead - would become one of our water stops on day two. The mountain has jokes.)

We rolled up to HQ about ten minutes before the gun, got our maps five minutes before the gun, then spent the next fifteen minutes studying those maps from completely the wrong starting position - which is how we missed the one announcement that mattered: the spot marked "Start/Finish" on the map was NOT the actual start/finish. It was the other one marked Start/Finish. So we crossed the line fifteen minutes late, certain we were standing somewhere we weren't, and I spent the next four hours wandering us through the woods wondering why every navigation instinct I owned had suddenly turned to garbage.

KC had a theory. Her theory was that this race was "above our ability level," and she shared it generously as I failed to find our first checkpoint. Two hours in, zero CPs, Valentine's Day - and that's the diplomatic summary of where things stood between us.

Then a truck pulled up. Out leans Mark Lattanzi himself - USARA board member, course designer, and author of a book literally titled Squiggly Lines, which is precisely what I'd been glaring at, willing them to make sense. "Are you guys lost?" he asks. My instinct, being a man, was to not look at him and keep staring at the map, as if prolonged eye contact with the squiggly lines might summon understanding. KC's instinct was to say "YUP!" Mark took our map, drew a little circle with his finger - "you're right around here somewhere" - and drove off. And instantly, I knew exactly where we were.

But knowing where we were and convincing KC of it turned out to be two different races. She was still sure we were in over our heads, and on the way to that first checkpoint she spotted a dad and a couple of his kids - also hunting it - peeling off into the woods the exact wrong direction. "We really should keep following them," she says. "No," I tell her, "they're going the wrong way - trust me." This, from the man who'd gotten us lost all morning. (In my defense: the map started us at the wrong lodge.) She wasn't thrilled about marching up some hill on the say-so of the day's worst navigator, but up we went - and tucked into a little hilly valley sat CP #100. Our first of the day, and being in the hundreds, worth a full 100 points.

The race unlocked. Five minutes later I bagged a 90-pointer. I was on - bearings locked, plan forming, ready to claw the whole thing back. KC was less on. Riding the sour end of two hours of fighting, she started in on why, if I was in the lead, I wasn't clearing the prickers out of her way and why I kept leaving her behind - neither of which was true. I was clearing the prickers. And I wasn't leaving her behind; I was scouting a little ahead to find our line down a big hill and onto the road. So I called her on the grumpiness. That did it: somewhere on that next hill KC exited stage left - done racing, done with this, done doing it with me on Valentine's Day of all days - and walked off the other way. With no map. Not a smart decision.

When we say we're Team "No lATTitude," there's a reason we capitalize the ATT. It's the ATTITUDE. So now I'm wandering the hills hollering her name, because KC is navigationally challenged and getting her back to the lodge in one piece is, whether I like it or not, my responsibility. Ten tense minutes later I found her - already headed back to quit.

And here's the part the race directors got to enjoy in real time: we had a GPS tracker clipped to my shoulder. So while KC and I sat outside the Yamagata Lodge for a solid hour saying nothing - her too angry to race, me too stubborn to walk inside and officially quit for her - somewhere indoors, someone was watching our little dot sit perfectly still, thinking what on earth are they doing. I don't quit things. She knew it. Eventually she handed me an ultimatum: be good, and she'll race.

It was noon. The race had started at eight. We'd gotten lost before it even began and had four checkpoints to show for it - and we walked back out onto that course anyway, this time with our bearings and KC with a better attitude. She'd apologize later. And to our credit, over the next six hours we gained just about all the ground it's possible to gain out of a hole that deep. We did not finish last on day one. Considering the first four hours, I'm choosing to read that as a podium.

Day two it rained all day, and day two was wonderful. We made the lodge on time. We started on time. We gave ourselves the full ten hours. We didn't fight. We had a plan that wasn't invented fifteen minutes after the gun. We took in the scenery - which is genuinely beautiful up there - together. We didn't win; we weren't anywhere near the podium. Sixteenth of seventeen coed, 72nd of 83 overall, 2,000 of a possible 6,000 points across the weekend. But we finished, we weren't close to last, and we loved hours four through twenty.

We proved we could run back-to-back ten-hour days with just about everything the mountain could throw at us - and one thing it couldn't. Valentine's Day 2026 isn't a day we'll forget, and it's not one we could repeat if we tried. We did the whole thing together. Even the hour we spent doing absolutely nothing.