Very impressive dude, well done! We get those sorts of numbers after running events for 40 years...
The long advanced looks fun once you’ve climbed the initial 175m up to control 5 :-) I assume that in Montana there is not much flat terrain about.
Yeah, that's definitely the flattest part of this map! We (mostly Gswede) have just started processing Lidar for a sweet, and much flatter, area about 40-50 minutes away from town. I can't wait to get my hands on the resulting product!
Yeah, those are very impressive numbers out of the gate! I think there's magic with smaller cities with the right sort of demographics like Missoula. I'm excited to see how it continues!
I used to organize a series of free, grassroots, weeknight, urban orienteering events around my neighborhood in Seattle ('Hood Hunts if you've been around AP long enough). I'd publicize to my friends, the orienteering community, neighborhood blogs, calendars on newspapers and such, and at the end of the day, it would basically be my friends and orienteers, and the occasional neighborhood person. We're talking 25-30 people.
And then I went on a monthlong business trip to Wichita, where I had zero previous connections (I'm originally from suburban Kansas City, ~3 hours from Wichita). I reached out to a local running group and submitted the event to some calendars. The same sort of effort as before.
But then the city's newpaper got interested and called me up for an article. When the article was printed, a local radio station got interested and invited me in for a live on-air interview. We had close to a hundred people show up, none of whom I knew!
That was in 2013, and every year or two, I'll still get an email from someone in Wichita asking about the "scavenger hunt" that I set up and how to do another one. It's usually a business looking for a team-building activity.
Seattle has a lot of smart, fit, hardy, outdoorsy people. Tens of thousands of them, maybe more. But in a big city, I feel that there's just too much else going on. Too many other people doing other things. It's hard to get any sort of exposure.
In places like Missoula or Wichita, I feel like it's much easier to break in. My first orienteering club in Lawrence, KS has fantastic per-capita orienteering numbers, too (way, way, way better than Seattle). It's a city of 100,000.
Great stuff.
Re small towns and O, I always felt that each town in Westchester (NY) could have 50-100 locals getting involved...
In Ireland, we don't have the same access to suitable terrain.
That is great you have good club growth....and an impressive amount of contours to cross on that course....I note you did not fill in the "climb" box.!
I think there's only so big of an area/populace a single club can cover and thrive with. Once a city/metro region gets too big you just aren't going to be able to attract and keep newer recreational participants (or people with busy kids) who don't want to drive across town (or the state!) when there's stuff closer to where they are. I can think of a few clubs that should really be multiple clubs covering smaller areas (NEOC and Phoenix, for starters).
Having events regularly like GrizO is doing is also really important!
I can think of a few clubs that should really be multiple clubs covering smaller areas
This used to be the case in Seattle and Puget Sound region. 20 years ago, there were Nisqually OC (Tacoma/south), Chuckanut OC (Bellingham/north), and Sammamish OC (Bellevue/east).
And then on the east side of the Cascade mountains, there was Ellensburg OC (the closest club to all of our "best" terrain) and Sacajawea OC (southeast WA, with no overlap with CascadeOC).
All of those clubs have since died out, leaving just Cascade and EWOC (which is now smaller than GrizO). From what I understand, none of these clubs made an effort to grow after the initial spurt in the 1980's, so it was just attrition.
In order to get four other clubs back in the CascadeOC "region", we'd need 4x the core volunteers to fill the boards and heavy lifter volunteer roles of each. We just don't have that, and it's hard to kickstart this effort from afar.
A few years ago, we tried heavily promoting our events in the Cle Elum area to the Cle Elum and Ellensburg communities, and it was a lot of work for very little payoff. When we have events out there, it's basically 150 people from Seattle driving 2 hours to run there.
NEOC used to be a lot bigger than it is now, before UNO split off and WCOC formed from a part of NEOC and a part of HVO. It hypothetically included Vermont and Maine as well. (CSU was always a separate entity, but for a very long time it was just a handful of members of a running/skiing club that put on very few orienteering events, until a bunch of college kids showed up and transformed everything.)
Very encouraging to hear about the success in Missoula. Maybe Montanans are more amenable to getting outdoors than suburban New Yorkers.
How did your Zoom meeting go?