Discussion: Blue Course

It was a great test of my orienteering skills after going without orienteering competitions or training for 3.5 months. I passed but without flying colors.

http://davegoesorienteering.blogspot.com/2012/09/l...

That looks like a very nice map. How many of those has Nadim done? I will look forward to getting there.

Nadim finished another map this year in north Bethesda/south Rockville that we already did a summer series on and plan on using for its first full scale event in April. And the map from yesterday doesn't cover the whole contiguous area in the Rock Creek watershed that he's field checked - there's a significant amount of terrain further south, plus the fringes of Lake Frank. Oh, and Blockhouse Point, though that's really only big enough for a summer series or other small scale training event. And the continually growing urban sprint map of Bethesda. The man spends a lot of time in the woods.

Excellent! Well, keep at it! It is nice to see a good mapper working on good terrain, in such an important orienteering market.

Blockhouse and Needwood are both nice. I really like Blockhouse despite its small size - been there twice already.

I can attest to the fact that Nadim spends a lot of time in the woods. And in front of his computer, drafting.
I am pretty sure he has plans for further mapping ...

Most of the time I enjoy getting out in the forest to do some mapping. It's relaxing and I like exploring new places. A lot of areas are not so fun to cover and it becomes work then. I like it when I find stuff that's not frequently found in the DC area like boulders, broad runnable hillsides w/o many reentrants, and cliffs. Though the rock here can be really small compared to stuff in NY and CT, I've set a low threshold and tried to be more or less constent with it so that it gives us something to work with. I learned to map better along the way but haven't always gone back to fix stuff (example: the Go control for Green/Brown that's mapped so small it looks like a boulder). One of my original goals for a lot of these maps I've worked on has not been to get the best terrain (that's largerly far away from me), but to get some more map options close to populations, so that more people can get involved in orienteering. The woods at Needwood are nice enough but being a stream valley park, it's narrow.

There were some problems with the map and printing on this go around. Since this is a thead about the Needwood event, I'll just address a few comments I've seen and heard about Blue and other courses:

Sorry about the troubles that those on Brown, Green, Red and Blue encountered. There were a couple of things making it difficult to read the map around controls #104 and #115 (#6 and #10 on the Blue course) which were near the landfill out of bounds. The north south running green stripes around #104 were added to indicate the summertime low vegetation--stilt grass that is spreading. In the winter it's basically not there and I've setup an OCAD map symbol so that the low summer growth can be turned off without affecting year-round low vegetation.

The red vertical lines west of #104 were mapped much higher than the control but with the green lines covering the area, it was harder to see the contours going above #104. The reentrant between #104 and #108 that a few weren't able to see is actually on the map. The reentrant runs north/south so by a coincidence that I didn't notice, the green line coincided right over much of the brown contour. Look carefully, perhaps with a magnifier and you'll see both green and brown (or maroon as it got printed on the final maps) as well as some slope tags, further south from #104 on the same contour--the eye tends to group things so most probably just saw the vertical line as a continuation of the green vertical lines. I'll try to fix this for next time.

I felt that #104 was in the woods, not in the rough open, or at least that's the way it has always been when I walked through before. Control #4 was on a new rootstock so a lot of new light was getting in where the tree had stood that I didn't notice enough to re-map.

Control #115 was difficult to tell how high it was and it was rather close to the out of bounds higher up. The map is busy there. A formline above the control makes it seem like the control should be further down. The obvious attack point would be the 2 close-together man made objects at the bottom of the reentrant. The broken control circle extends to these making them hard to read. The man made objects were large cylindrical pieces of concrete in tall grass that looked like large boulders from a distance. The control circle, though broken, still hides some of the contours--I usually err by breaking too much of a control circle. Confirmation of being high enough would be to see the mapped lone tree in the field when standing at the control. The tree was visible right above the control.

The mandatory crossings on Blue, Green, Red and Brown were put in not because I wanted them, but to avoid any liability issues associated with the microtoxin coming from algae in the lake (see the park web site for an explanation). I didn't know about the algae until September. I think the courses would have been marginally better without mandatory crossings as the creek can be crossed. I used the standard Condes method and symbol with the crossings. The symbol was put on top of the bridges at the point that they crossed the water. OCAD prints much larger and easier to read crossing point symbol. Condes prints them so small that they are hard to see. I couldn't find a way to adjust the size. I didn't use controls at the crossings. There were already so many set, 50 altogether which is nearly the limit of our local epunch boxes, and 28 on tthe Blue course, that adding more would make the courses even worse and would bump up against the maximum controls that could be recorded on the older Si cards.

Control #148 (#16 on Red and #24 on Blue) caused more trouble than I expected. With it being in a green area, I thought I was hanging this one relativly high. I could see the paved trail while standing right at it. I probaby erred hanging some of the other controls on the courses too low. With the visibility in the abundant white woods generally very good, hanging them high everywhere (about knee height was how I judged it sometiimes standing in a ditch) seemed like it would have been too easy.

There was a problem with control #106 (Red, Green, Brown and Orange)--it either fell or was knocked down. Corrine Porter found it on a rock and thankfully tied it up again. It was hung on the south side of a large boulder, on an island in the stream. It was very visible from the south, but not as much coming from the north where the advanced courses did.

The competition maps themselves got printed a little bit small. When I printed from a PDF on my printer at home, it worked just fine. Everything fit and the colors were correct. The final printing was done on a different printer. When this was discovered without me being around to make an adjustment, some shrinking was applied. Competitors probably got closer to a 1:11,000 map instead of 1:10,000 and the contours printed rather on the red side.

The weather was a nice but I didn't discover the bumper crop of acorns that were starting to cover the ground until the Friday before the Sunday meet. It hurt when they hit you and they made the slopes really slippery.

I took a closer look at the map and can now see the re-entrant between 104 and 108. As usual I was wearing contacts (when I was orienteering at Needwood) which makes it tough for me to see some of the finer details of the map.

I'm not sure how feasible this is but maybe next time the map could be printed larger either by printing it on a larger piece of paper or by printing part of it one side and part on the other side of the same piece of paper.