Out of Shape #5: Mountin’ Frustration
We hope you'll be piqued by a peek at this peak.
Winter is in full swing and if there's one thing our fans know about us, it's that there’s nothing we like more than sitting around the chalet and coming up with puzzles that are vaguely about skiing. This month's puzzle finds you deposited along the trails of Mount Rackenfrack, a stark and frankly dangerous summit of our own design.
This puzzle does not have a style antecedent, exactly — there are a fair number of triangular grids in the canon, but none we're aware of with this ruleset — so its shape and approach should provide some novelty even among the Out of Shape family.
Thanks for intrepid test schusses from Andy and John (who both faced the mountain before we figured out how to get the solve time under 3 hours) and to our editor/ski pro Will Nediger who kept us between the gates the whole way down.
Note for online solvers: There’s a lot of information in this weird grid that had to get translated — be sure to check the notes to understand the tweaks we had to make. The critical difference to note is between an isosceles mountain on paper, and the right-angled online version. Note that when solving online you can only go down, or diagonally down and to the right — never diagonally down and to the left.
Happy skiing.