Discussion: Summer Orienteering Camps

A club member recently asked me if I knew about any summer camps that have good (real) orienteering programs. If anyone has any experience with camps that do a good (or lousy) job of orienteering, I'd be interested in knowing.

Also, when I googled "orienteering summer camps", I noticed that a Camp Lohikan in the Poconos of NE Pennsylvania is looking to hire a program director for orienteering. Any of you older juniors (or seasonally underemployed teachers) who are interested in a cool summer job, this might be a possibility. I doubt if they have a real orienteering map, though... that might be a necessary first step.

It would be nice if we could get "real" orienteering into more summer camps. I know there's still a lot of "compass and pace" out there.

Mike Minium
VP Program Development
US Orienteering Federation

Worse than that, all the "bearing and pace count" activities done instead of navigating with a map under the moniker orienteering are just killing us PR-wise. I can't count the number of times someone has told me "orienteering, yeah I did that in [insert group name here] when I was [insert age or location here]." 9 times out of 10 they have no clue what orienteering is, but worse yet, won't even listen long enough to discover it's actually fun!

And of course this is happening ever more frequently now that our kids are of school age and starting to join various [insert group name here]'s. So it made my day when their Bill Koch XC ski club leader told me early this past winter that they would be doing a ski-O day one week, and when I questioned a little more she produced an actual ski-O map that had been made years ago by somone I know who used to be on the US Ski-O Team. I was so happy I offered to update the map and set the courses for her! And we're doing it this Sunday!

Of course we had the exact opposite experience with the local 4H club. It's actually an excellent club that has great leaders and does many fine activities. But the leader is ex-Army and "knows" all about orienteering. :-( Next map project will probably be to find out where she takes them, make a nice (color!) map, and then offer to "help out" there. Hopefully if we offer her a cool-looking map she will let us "assist" with the teaching.

I agree ... somedays I feel like all true orienteers should rise up and launch a crusade against the "bearing and pace counters " (and I am a mathematician and engineer)! . I regularly give classes at the local REI and the audience seems to split into those who get it (want to really feel / see/ appreciate the terrain when they navigate) and a few 10% who come to the class determined that the only way they can navigate is if they learn to blindly use a protractor compass and pace count (I hope they avoid trips to the Iron Range in northern MN !).

There is hope, I am finding more and more naturalists / camp leaders who get it and want an O map and a features and map based POC at their location. I even have two nature centers who originally put in compass and bearing POC posts (and now have grooves worn in the land between them) and have ripped them out in favor of a proper POC. It takes time and effort.

Meanwhile well meaning scout groups plant more compass and bearing posts to get their badges and set up more straight line grooves in the land (maybe that was what was going on in the desert in the Andes where are those ancient lines in the desert are ?)

I pace count. It is particularly useful on old maps that might have new, unmarked trails.

I saw someone taking a bearing once. Just when I was about able to see who it was, I was blinded by some baltering flo-glo tights.

I hate it when that happens!

I know of an orienteering summer camp. See this page, and scroll down to August 18-21. (I'm teaching it.)

Laramie Days [sic] and the U.S. Champs are also listed.

TJOC in north Texas is June 8th to June 14th. It has moved to All Saints Camp on Lake Texoma. To apply go to tjoc.org. When you look at the overall result of the past few Interscholastic Champ. it does a very good job of training.

I started orienteering because I was teaching it at a summer camp. I didn't have a colored O-Map, didn't have control punches, and I even had to teach some pace and bearing skills. But it was still really fun!

In some places, it's just not feasible to get a detailed O-map. But you can improvise a map (with aerial photos, facilities maps, or hand sketches), throw in some twists (from card games to backpacking expeditions), and still have a great time.

If you really are trying to sell orienteering to an outsider, think about presentation. We can actually look pretty out of touch, running around in neon pajamas with ridiculously detailed maps, completely oblivious to important details like declination. Many experienced navigators actaully do follow bearings, and we need to relate with them, rather than looking down on them.

Here are the key points in my sales pitch:
1) Orienteering is fun. Kids get excited about racing and exploring, not walking in a straight line.
2) In real life, map reading trumps. Before you follow the compass, somebody has to pick a route.
3) Detailed maps = more chances to learn. Effective learning requires trial and error. The orienteering map scale allows more decisions per mile and more immediate feedback.

Darn those Army guys, anyway!

I know what you mean...but then again, remember most of the time the Army teaches people to navigate on 1:50,000 maps, with unpleasant consequences for failing to pass their training requirements. I had a guy who had done some JROTC orienteering in my squad the first summer we were cadets...he went on and on about orienteering and how "all these boulders would be mapped" (yeah, right - those of us who've run on the West Point maps know better! It's gotta be a BOULDER to make these maps) and the other 9 of us just wanted him to be quiet and quit getting us lost. Two different skill sets...related, but not the same. Getting orienteers and military personnel to speak the same language can be interesting. I'd start with asking what map scale they're used to working with - most would probably be intrigued by an O map once they let go of the reflex to reach for the lanyard to their compasses.

Speaking of summer training, does anyone know of any good training camps / meets after WUOC (28 Jul - 3 Aug) in Europe? I have a cadet who needs some official summer training credit, so I need to engage him in orienteering for another week in August. I can always bring him back here, but since we're flying him to Estonia anyway, we might as well send him somewhere interesting.

He could try the the French 6 Days. There is a small overlap but still sounds like good stuff.

blegg, I don't think even we are speaking completely the same language! When iriharding and I were dissing the bearing and pace-count game, what we were complaining about is the activity that goes by the name "orienteering" but involves only a compass and pace-counting, but NO MAP -- which is completely backwards. I am always sickened when I see a well-intentioned, experienced orienteer giving a beginner clinic to a group of soon-to-be white course participants and going on and on about the compass. My favorite white course compass explanation is "You don't need a compass yet, just stick the compass in your pocket, read the map, and you'll do great!"

Hey, yesterday we did our ski-O with the cross-country ski club. We had 10 kids of ages ranging from 5 to 10 years. They had skied these trails before but had never seen a decent map of them before. It's a confusing tightly woven web of interconnecting trails that even after mapping I still find confusing, especially at speed. I set a course for them that was well beyond the acceptable guidelines for a foot-O white course, and in fact would have been semi-reasonable for an IOF Ski-O World Cup sprint if it were a little bit longer.

Before the start we paired up all but the oldest kids with others and assigned adult shadows just to be safe. Then we pinned the maps to their jackets, gave a quick 5-minute talk in Q&A format to give them the idea of what they were about to do, and then sent them off in a mass-start. None of them had a compass, and with the maps pinned to them couldn't even rotate their map without turning their whole body along with it.

They had a great time and during the end-of-the-ski-season party that followed, when the club leader was going through the season-long agenda asking which events people liked best in order to get feedback on what to keep and what to throw out for next year, I was so thrilled to hear several kids yell "SKI-O!"

The most interesting story was from the leader who shadowed the 2nd fastest skier. She said his plan from the start was to follow the fastest skier, but by about the 3rd or 4th control (out of 10) he was out of site and that plan had to be rethunk. She said it took him a couple controls to really get comfortable with the map but once he figured it out he got right into it and it wasn't long before he was looking for short-cuts wherever he could find them!

Another adult told me he heard the (younger/slower) kids talking over route planning with each other and discovering that there were more than one viable route on many of the legs, and how cool they thought that was.

Frankly I'd never set courses for such a young group before and didn't really know how much I could expect of them. I knew they were all semi-proficient skiers by this point but didn't know how long a mental/physical activity like this would hold their attention. But they loved it and can't wait to do it again! Now we just need to get more kids into the club so we can infect more of them with the ski-O bug next winter!

I had been bummed about missing the Billygoat for this, but not after seeing how well it came off. 10 youngsters who want more ski-O beats yet another Billygoat with a bunch of aging fossils in my book any day! :-)

The lack of a detailed map shouldn't hold anybody back in doing proper orienteering. Yes, some folks think O maps are way too detailed but you don't need every tree and boulder to be mapped to make your way through the forest and not bump into them (and hurt yourself). USGS maps (even the 1:62500) are fine provided you use them with some sense. Just like on a 1:5,000 sprint O map you don't have navigate by each "blade of grass" , you don't use tiny features when using a 1:24,000 USGS map . You don't try to a navigate 150 meters on a USGS map. You go with hills, valleys, streams etc and use them to navigate in a rather more coarse grained fashion but with terrain feedback.

Once folks get the terrain feedback and they have experienced the benefit of a properly oriented map , then lay the protractor compass on top of it with compass needle "in the shed' and the mag north lines on the map all lined up correctly and they see how it all works.

Jumping into protractor compass without them seeing it's relation to the world and the map , is like asking a young kid to figure "miles per hour " or similar . They may well remember you have to divide , and get it right for simple cases that they are familiar with what the answer should be (100 miles ,2 hours ; a typical car journey ) but they can't do something which they are not familiar with e.g. 2 miles in 10 hrs even if you give them a calculator

I navigate in straight lines on bearings with dead reckoning (nautical pace counting) sailing on large bodies of water, but even then I use terrain feedback ( sightings of land bodies and lighthouses , depth soundings, etc) to keep track of position because wind/current/tidal vectors also come into play. In that case "terrain feedback" is rather important since you don't really want to hit it ! (Throw in as well as the issue of great circle route vs straight line drawn (depending which chart projection you are using) and you have some more fun with maps/charts and finding your way round the planet).

Tye-Dyed Gary should have listed the Texas Junior Orienteering Camp as tjoc.us, not tjoc.org

This is an excellent program for kids with at least some prior orienteering experience who are interested in seriously developing their orienteering skills. But I think the original questioner was looking more for a general all-around summer camp that also has a good orienteering program. Here's his original question:

>>Dear Mike, I am looking for an orienteering camp for my 14 year old son for this summer. We hike and backpack together, and he would like to learn to use a map and compass. Do you know of any camps where they have this sort of activity as part of their activities?<<