I did an adventure race last weekend in tahoe. Within the race was a 3 r rogaine using a spooner map. it was a great map and course. i suspect that the course was designed by the local O-club.
loved the open terraine (unlike the PNW)
I've heard that Spooner is the best of BAOC's maps, though I've never been there myself. :-)
Not the best, just one of the many excellent maps that we have both at Lake Tahoe and in the Bay Area. Our last 2-day A meet courses at Spooner Lake are available on RouteGadget. For example,
http://baoc.org/gadget/cgi/reitti.cgi?act=map&id=6...
Was it 1999 that the U.S. Champs were there? This year's Junior World Champs maps reminded me of Spooner Lake.
RouteGadget did not exist at that time, but there are some great photos at
http://www.cascadeoc.org/Spooner.html Some are by Nic Bone.
I think the Australian terrain was rockier on the ground than Spooner was.... but the maps only show the big and relevant boulders. So the house sized rocks were usually shown, but many the size of a SUV were overlooked. If you check out those results in 1999 Malcolm Wyatt-Mair won M-12... and this summer he was at the JWOC and still racing well!
Does anybody know if the rogaine was set by a local club? It definitely seemed like it was done professionally (ie by an O club). I liked the defined hills with many converging reentrants, the bolders were good and if they were not all mapped, there were many other terrain features to use. It was 98% open forest running and the coloring on the map was pretty on.
since we were 6 or so hours into the race, the pace wasn't real fast and the controls were not like a 24hr rogaine. We were picking up controls at about 7 per hour. And the slow pace allowed for better nav. We were required to get 20 of 25 controls. I took about 15 minutes to get a general route and then refined control choice as i had more time to look at the map on the run.
The first control was probably the hardest as I was struggling to get my mind scaled down to 1:10,000 from 1:24,000 and reduced contour interval size.
I'm surprised to hear this. BAOC is quite negative on letting "outside organizations" use the club's maps, especially if profit is involved. I wonder if the club indeed had given permission to use the Spooner Lake map, especially given the fact that on a major portion of it (NFS land?), BAOC is no longer allowed to hold orienteering events.