Training Log Archive: Nadim

From Northfield Rd., to Old Georgetown Rd. via Greenwich Park, to the Bethesda Trolley Trail, to Woodglen Dr., to Nicholson Ln., to Executive Blvd./Jefferson St. at Lorraine Dr. in Rockville. I hadn't run this in a while. It was around 40 starting out. My mile times varied with the climb. We met the old MCRRC crowd for breakfast at Panera Bread. At one point Peggy remarked "Dude, I wasn't even born when you graduated high school!" They are a good talkative subgroup from NASA who've done a lot for MCRRC.

Serpentine Barrens Conservation Park, MD. After doing some things at home, I got over to the park in time to beat the rain. It was about 40 F but felt colder. This was my first time actually trying to field check here as the outing Peggy and I did earlier was really scouting.

I got started from a fence corner and put a nearby dot knoll and rootstock on paper. Going to a visible rootstock further out, I didn't have anything to triangulate from. At first, I took a waypoint on my GPS and just estimated the distance on paper. That usually works for me in other places but with the area sloping so gently and evenly, I could't pin point it on paper as I would in places with more contour. After doing my best with that, I tried to place a boulder next but again, only had my last mapped feature that was visible and helpful. As this park is mostly point features, my notes were getting messy quickly. Before going out, I'd marked some areas that Karttapullautin picked out as boulders. I'd also used high resolution imagery and got many points between Karttapullautin and the imagery to line-up well. I thought it'd help me in the forest but it didn't turn out that way so far. I hope my GPS track and waypoints help enough. At least next time I'll have more to go on.

I did get to other places where I could triangulate later. However, this wasn't working so well. It turns out that magnetic north was off. I thought I'd adjusted for it already, but I think I turned it the wrong way and ended up 20 degrees off. That didn't help getting things onto paper any.

I was glad that the point features were abundant. I found more boulders looking randomly spaced as well as a nice amount of full looking rootstocks widely spread out. There were some areas of stony ground that I took GPS tracks for. The thorny areas seemed daunting but I'd pre-mapped what I could by reading it off of high resolution imagery. The results seemed to correlate pretty well.

I'll have to step up my skills to map this park correctly. If I can, it could become one of our most technical maps.