5-19, this was the front page and I mean almost ALL of the front page of the paper."thumbsup" pics were good too.
Nice day for a crawl
By JOHN HARRINGTON - IR Staff Writer - 05/19/07
John Argyle of Lehi, Utah, confidently steered his off-road truck around a competition obstacle course off Rimini Road on Friday, climbing boulders, spanning rope bridges and splashing through Ten Mile Creek.
Afterward, he set down his remote control and commented on his performance.
“It’s a real good course, actually. Very challenging,” he said. “I was dreading it.”
Argyle and several dozen others from throughout the Rockies and Pacific Northwest are in town this weekend for the first All Northwest Scale Meet, bringing together hobbyists who make their own machines, then test them on manmade amphibious and dry courses west of town.
“Guys are just proud of their own equipment and their own vehicles,” said Dan Conner, 36, one of several Coloradans who traveled to Helena for the competition. “There are no ready-to-run kits here. All these guys are a testament to mechanical knowledge.”
While not as expensive as the real thing, model off-road crawling isn’t exactly cheap. Argyle said he had around $700 in the truck he used Friday, and another $1,000 in a larger model for today’s competition on a dry boulder course.
The competition was put together by Ben Palmer, who’s the finance manager at Placer Motors in addition to the owner of Montana Scale Designs, an online store that sells parts for radio controlled crawlers. He said he’s pleased with the turnout and expects to host the crawlers again next May.
Friday’s time trials were hardly fast-paced. The finesse and control of the operator appear to be at least as important as the power of the vehicle. It took 15 or 20 minutes to complete the course, which ran about 50 feet along the riverbank.
In addition to being timed, competitors lose points for needing to use reverse (except where expressly called for on the layout), hitting a boundary cone and having to reposition their vehicles, or turn them upright after a wreck.
Radio controlled rockcrawling is one of the newer offshoots of model car racing, the competitors said. The sport has only developed in the past two or three years, and many of the weekend’s participants have been involved for less than a year.
The field is mostly men in their 20s and 30s, though several women took part and one driver was as young as 6.
“It’s just good-natured fun,” said Melissa Otteson, one of a group of nine who traveled several hundred miles from St. Helens, Ore. “My boyfriend did it and it looked like fun, so I decided to do it too.”
John Harrington can be reached at 447-4080 or
john.harrington@helenair.com.
