We had great conditions for our first orienteering event on Woodpecker Ridge, part of Falls Lake, State Recreational Area. We will definitely be back, and each time the map will improve steadily (though it was definitely serviceable for this event.)

I generally try to design classic courses so that the run-in to the finish is fast and easy. As a competitor, I often find it annoying when I’m taxed to do some hard navigation on the very last leg. It’s not wrong to design challenging legs for the run-in; but it’s not exactly the norm. So I was disappointed in myself when a handful of runners had trouble getting from the final control (often called the ‘GO’ control) to the finish. I had figured that because the start and the finish were in the same spot, it would be fairly easy to just return to where they had started because runners would be somewhat familiar with that area. But the stream to the north of the finish is quite complex, not all of its detail has been properly mapped, and the finish circle itself obscured a lot of this detail. I typically cut control circles on the map to expose navigationally relevant things that the circle covers; but I had forgotten to do this for the finish circle. Below is what it should have looked like:

This super-blown up version of the map reminds me of another factor that needs to be accounted for in course design.  As a mapper and course-setter, I typically carry with me in the field a map that is much more blown-up than the competition map.  If I end up printing maps at 1:10,000 scale, I’ll typically use one at 1:5000 for course and map prep.  So I get accustomed to seeing the map at a much clearer scale than competitors will ever see.  I try to keep this difference in mind, but occasionally it can cause issues.  For example, at our Falls Lake event, nearly everyone visited control #77, which was described as the ‘eastern reentrant’.  At a close enough scale, the map looks like this:

However, at the scale that most maps were printed, this tiny little side reentrant is almost impossible to make out.

Finally, a couple of competitors were rusty on the control description symbols, and I offered to direct them to our club’s page that summarizes this. The page is here.

Many thanks to the staff of Falls Lake for supporting our events. And huge thanks to Phil Tosteson, Will Allen, and Brian Pike for collecting the controls after the event. Results follow.

Falls Lake Jan 2025, Split times

2025-01-26

Created 2025-01-26 15:22:34 with SI-Droid Event 1.16.1

Filed under: Event Results, Latest News by David Waller