Deer Lakes Park
Comprehensive Orienteering Training
24 April 2016

We had an excellent day for orienteering; temperature about 70 degrees with plenty of sun.  No doubt, the weather had a significant influence on our turnout which was very good.  We had about as many people as we could handle for the beginner and intermediate sessions.

Joe Logan, who designed all of the courses except the intermediate one, taught both of the beginner sessions.  They began at 11 am and 1 pm with 16 participants and 15 participants, respectively.  Everyone on those courses seemed to have a good time with many of them finding all 20 controls in their score-format course.  Jim Wolfe designed the intermediate course and taught the intermediate session which began at noon and had 15 participants. Many of those in the intermediate session expressed appreciation and felt they learned something significant for future orienteering.

The three advanced exercises consisted of a trail-less course, a donut hole course and a corridor course.  The trail-less one was the most popular with at least 34 people going out on it.  This was designed just like a normal short course; however, all trails had been removed from the map.  Participation exceeded the number of maps that were preprinted so we had to recycle the maps as people came back from that course.  There was also a mistake in placing one control on the trail-less course; for the most part no one really cared because it was just a training exercise.  The donut hole course was also designed like a normal course; however, the area within a radius of 75 meters from the control feature was totally erased.  Also, the control description simply named the feature; there were no qualifications or clarifications.  10 people tried this course.  The corridor course was on a map that consisted of a 75 meter wide serpentine strip.  The only other thing on the map was the north lines; control locations were not marked but were guaranteed to be on a standard feature near the center of the mapped corridor.  8 people tried this course; it was the most difficult of the three exercises.

Thanks to Barbara Johnstone, Tali Shalom-Barak, Yaki Barak, Laurie Opila and Ryan Knecht for handling registration.  Thanks to Naomi Jarvis, Alexis Rzewski and Joe Logan for doing start/finish.  Thanks to Edna and Tim Spang, John Notte, James Fenn, Naomi and Alexis for picking up the controls.

As this was a training event, there are no results.  You can see the photos that Alexis took here