Discussion: A rare off-trail bike navigation opportunity...

... has been offered to Get Lost!! by the Bureau of Land Management. We love to have cyclists at our rogaines, because guess what—many of these folks are former runners. Knees just don't last as long as the rest of the body under most competitive use conditions! All of us either just turned 40, or are about to, and although none of us have joint problems yet, we've seen plenty of great athletes who do... and it'd be awful to lose them if there's not a chance for them to enjoy navigation sports any longer! So, we love to work to create at least a version of the future in which cyclists can enjoy the same, or close to the same, opportunities to navigate as runners.

We started last year with our inaugural Get Lost!! in Fort Ord. This place is a mecca for cyclists, with a very long and somewhat dense network of carefully engineered trails, graded far less steeply than trails in a typical Bay Area park. And technical, too; lots of twists and sand! And the twists make careful distance estimation important for route choice, so it's not just the bike part that's technical, navigation is too.

Unfortunately, we can't go off trail at Fort Ord, on bike or on foot. There is too much unexploded ordnance on this former Army base, and also some protected species. So, the first event at Fort Ord and the one just completed had to stick to trails. Not the most entertaining set of constraints for runners, and perhaps for cyclists.

But, the landowner, the BLM, has another property nearby that they are anxious to see use of. It's huge, hundreds of km²... and comes with very few use stipulations. Our event planned for Saturday 23 November (weekend before Thanksgiving) at BLM Panoche Hills will be a 4- and 8-hour rogaine, offering off-trail navigation for foot and bike teams. Permit and full information are coming within the month of August. We know there are some strong cyclists among you who'll love the opportunity to go pretty much anywhere! The terrain is rolling, treeless hills, with grasses dead in November.

And, all future rogaines by Get Lost!! are planned to include a bike division of some kind... fully on-trail, or CPs off trail with foot travel required between trails, or, as the case is at Panoche Hills and a number of other possible areas, with no restrictions. Stay tuned!

NIce. I found the BLM's Panoche Hills website, http://www.blm.gov/ca/st/en/fo/hollister/recreatio.... But it shows that a significant part of the area are Wilderness Study Areas, where vehicle traffic is restricted. Does that include bicycles?

The deal is, no off-trail bike travel in the wilderness study areas, but off-trail foot travel is allowed there. For this first use, we will stay entirely clear of the WSAs, so we'll be in the southern and eastern portions of the area (Tumey Hills). We use "Panoche Hills" as the name for the entire jurisdiction, including Tumey and Griswold Hills. The HQ will be somewhere on Panoche Road, most likely at the saddle point (access from I-5, not from Hollister/CA-25).

I see. From a quick look in Google Earth, the Tumey Hills area looks better anyway. a fair amount of flat (relatively).