Discussion: vegetation?

What did you think about vegetation mapping changes? Of course my mapping is poor and incorrect, but did it make you use some other features to navigate for familiars trees being missing or something?

I guess it was not too difficult. Might be for someone who is new to the area. Course itself is really easy. There is pretty good street view images over the area, I did use any of that or aerials or anything when planning the course or editing map, that was just based on intuition and imagination :) I can see now some parts look pretty crappy in street view imagery - actually pretty much everything except cut crass and pavement.

Here is sat image overlay:
https://map.routegadget.net/?zoom=17&mapurl=http%3...

I liked how you changed the single trees to blobs of white. I've used that approach on a small sprint map where I drew a green dot for the tree and then tried to show the canopy with white. It is easier to read on the move.

The area around controls 4 and 16 is different depending on the season. It usually gets mowed (or even burned) in the spring. Then it is fast and open. But the land doesn't get mowed the rest of the year and it gets deep and junky. The map was made by a Danish orienteer who was in town to study the ice sheets in Greenland and made the map in his free time. I'm guessing the area around 4 and 16 was fast when he mapped it.

Most of what I was using to find control locations was angles between big features (like corners of buildings, corners of parking areas, and road junctions. That's what I try to do anyways, but it was more necessary with the features being blank-area-in-center-of-circle.

Thanks again, it was fun to have a new course and training idea.

Speaking of trees, was it those trees almost in your backyard that were the subject of some controversy, and which were subjected to the bulldozer recently?

The controversial tree removal was an area a bit east of us. We can't see that spot from our house, but if you go a couple of houses east of us, then the trees that were cut down were just across their backyards.

The land owner wanted to build a big student apartment complex (the area wasn't zoned for that and the comprehensive plan called for office spaces. When the City turned down the rezoning request, the property owner sent a bulldozer out to cut down all of the trees. I know that wasn't very nice. I also suspect that you don't want to be doing that when there is an active and concerned neighborhood (and one of the neighbors next to the cut trees is probably the most respected local politician).

I believe controls on no feature has plenty of unused potential, both sprint and forest. Would make it much easier and standard practice to set courses with interesting route choice. We'd get more out of our maps and areas, for example continental terrains with slopes without much details. Were O invented someplace with no much details it might be just normal way to do it. Just need to be careful to place control correctly and visible enough to not make them bingo, and use larger flags I suppose. I hope someone takes the initiative somewhere some day.