Training Log Archive: iansmith

Event: NEOC: Noon Hill
 

Hanging controls for the Noon Hill event.

Today was the debut event at Noon Hill, a map made in 2015! Noon Hill became something of a project of mine - I first visited the terrain in April 2015. Marcello had some extra time after finishing the High Rock map, so after some consultation with the mapping committee, I directed him to map Noon Hill and Upton Town Forest. Noon Hill is complete; Upton is usable for a 5-6 km course, but a little less than half of the total available terrain. Noon Hill is about 2 sq km and has a varied mix of rocky hills and rolling flats with marshes.

The map was completed in June of last year, and would probably have been used sooner but for the national meet this spring at High Rock. I designed courses up to a 5.8 km red course. A few places I wanted to set controls were a little too thick when I vetted in September, but I imagine the patches of light green might be manageable closer to winter.

Despite a dreary day with perpetual mist and fog, we had respectable turnout with 80-90 people. Parking was just adequate, with good packing of the lot at the start and spillover onto the gravel Noon Hill road. Care must be taken to park on only one side of the road and to make sure dog walkers and other park users feel welcome.

I have long been an advocate of minimizing the organizational cost of local meets. An organization like NEOC has soft constraints on its volunteer manpower, so minimizing the logistical cost per event or per time spent orienteering enables more events. I spent about ten hours designing courses, vetting the locations, and updating my designs - course design is much easier on a new, accurate map, though I did change several locations due to vegetation or ambiguity. I personally spent about twenty hours on all other aspects of the meet including recruiting staff, gathering equipment, inquiring about permissions and so on. Sunday was a marathon; I woke up at 5 AM and finished at about 4 PM. My volunteers were fantastic - Tim Parson, Andy McIlvaine, Richard Powers, and Peter Amram executed the first hour of registration without any guidance from me; Tim Booth and Bo Nielsen ran results; Keith Durand, Bo, and John Kernochan worked registration for the second part (Magnus stopped by for a bit); Tim P, Tim B, Dave Yee, Izzy, and Ethan orchestrated the cleanup; and Dave, Izzy, and Ethan picked up controls. Tim Parson was the MVP, arriving at 9 AM with tents, setting up the site, working registration, and cleaning up at 2 PM. Having such a great, independent, and competent team of volunteers makes event direction easy and compensates for some of my own organizational shortcomings. I estimate the staffing cost at 20 hours; allotting 10-20 hours for the administration arranging permission, the total cost of the event was 70 hours of volunteer time.

For Phil Bricker: I personally hung all 33 controls (including one highly technical one without a compass), and I heard no complaints that anything was on a wrong features. One of the controls - #166 - was listed as being at foot of a 1.5m cliff, but I hung it on a tree at the top. This was deliberate; I didn't see a good spot to hang it below the cliff, and as yellow was one of the courses using the control, I wanted it to be visible. I suppose this makes your conjecture true, though only in the most generous sense.

Control pickup. Ethan, Izzy, and Dave also picked up controls. I found my compass, which I had dropped at one of the controls while hanging. I was a bit tired at the end of the day, but manageably so.