In my opinion, Carolina North Forest is probably BOK’s best venue for night orienteering.  On one hand, there are a lot of winding, potentially confusing trails, making route choice and navigation –even if it’s largely on trails – somewhat challenging.  But because there are so many trails and junctions, there are almost always opportunities for competitors to re-locate if they’re lost.  It’s a great level of difficulty for a night-O.

One of my goals in directing this event was to get people down to the recently clear-cut area before it becomes too dense and completely unrunnable in the future.  I re-mapped this area a couple of months ago, and already its edges should probably show denser, less passable, vegetation than it currently does.  I was glad that at least some people were tempted to run some legs through this area instead of going around.  It will likely be our last opportunity to run there in our lifetimes.

It’s not uncommon for our night events to have relatively easy control locations, or to be score-O’s, in which competitors can skip those controls that are giving them trouble.  Not so with this event.  These courses pulled no punches; they were very hard, and would be perfectly respectable courses even in the daytime.  Kudos to those who were able to find all of the controls that they sought, because some were quite difficult.   In this category, control #51 probably deserves a special mention.  Although it was only about 20 meters from a trail junction, it was in very thick weeds, on a boulder that was covered by a downed tree.  The control description tried to clue people into the idea that there was a downed tree at the control, but the flag and reflector were still quite buried.   One could only see it from two or three meters away.

At the risk of further ingraining this meet in our collective memory as “that night-O where Dave misplaced the last control” I did want to say a few words about control #46.  Most competitors who approached this control from the south had trouble with it.  I went back out Sunday morning to examine the area, and agree that it was unfortunately placed 25-30 meters too far to the northeast.  It was hung fairly high, but was in the same patch of light/medium green vegetation as the circled location, and as a result was not visible from the correct location.  The problem was particularly acute because it was a night-O.  Many apologies to the runners who got frustrated and/or lost time with this control.  In the results that follow, I have completely voided that control.  The legs to and from that control were deleted, the course lengths were adjusted, and a nominal 10 second run-in to the finish was applied.

In retrospect, given that there was so little motivation to pick up controls at 11:00 PM (and thus most were collected on Sunday morning) it would have been better to have extended our cutoff time past 10:30.  Despite the huge proportion of non-finishers, the results below show that most runners were doing fine – albeit fairly slowly – but were just not able to finish their course before the cutoff time.   Thanks to those folks for pulling out of their course and coming back in on time, sparing us the concerns about their safety.

Two more mea culpas.  Most of the man-hole covers on the far west side of the park have not been mapped.  I forgot about them when I planned one of the route options on the orange course.  Apologies to any runners who tried to use them to navigate.  There was also a very short unmapped connector trail along the north side of the clear-cut, just north of control #51.  I only discovered this trail on the day of the meet, as I was putting out controls.  Sorry if its absence on the map confused anyone.

Many thanks to Patrick Sears, Jeff and Debra Rezeli, and Kevin Frankowski for help with control pickup.  Results follow, with legs to and from control #46 on the brown, green, and red courses voided.

Carolina North, Night-O, 14 September, Results

2019-09-14

Created 2019-09-15 12:40:34 with SI-Droid Event 1.8.12

Carolina North, Night-O, 14 September, Split times

2019-09-14

Created 2019-09-15 12:40:18 with SI-Droid Event 1.8.12

Filed under: Event Results, Latest News by David Waller