COC 2008 Long---
Course 9---Map says 7.6km, 305m, but I didn't do the whole course. My GPS says I did 7.1km, but that seems too long. My guess is 5.5km.
I was pretty dazed when I finished. I was more than a little bit angry. I had major errors on 1, 2, and 4. So much that I decided to shorten the course by going from 6 to 14 and then to finish from there. (I had another 24 hour drive starting from the parking lot.)
When I was on the course, it felt like the map sucked, that the controls were bingo placements (especially 1, 2, 4, and 14-omg). {Edit---It felt like 2 was bingo, but it wasn't.} I spoke briefly to AZ at the finish, and I tried to be objective. I wanted to take some time to look at the map and especially my GPS track. This terrain is outside my comfort zone, and I purposely took some aggressive routes rather than take easier trail routes. (It was a 24 hour drive to Fundy, so running trails was a low priority.) I don't remember exactly what I said to AZ. I think I said the vegetation mapping made no sense to me, the controls were often in green.
Now, almost 2 weeks later, I've had time to look at the map and my GPS tracks. The tracks are shocking to me. I'm pretty sure they are very inaccurate {edit--- inaccurate regarding say 50m accuracy---It misses *a lot* of the little jinks, especially at 1 where I was all over the place. At 1, I was primarily in the reentrant bottom or within 20m of it. The track shows I massively overshot the control, and that's just not true. I was in the reentrant at least 100m north of the powerline}. I have an old Garmin 201, and it doesn't do well under foliage.
Here is my track laid over the map.
The first leg looked pretty scary based on my experience from Saturday. I first considered the road to the powerline (coming into the control backwards), but it seemed long, and frankly, when I see a course setter do that, I feel like they're telliing me the straight route is doable. My plan was to run to the fork in the road, go right into the tongue of white about 100m, crossing a shallow reentrant (the stream mapping stops here, so it must be subtle), then go almost exactly SW for a few hundred meters, then turn directly south into the marshy reentrant (again, no linear stream/ditch/marsh mapping). I thought I nailed the execution. I found the marshy reentrant, but no controls. I didn't aim off, so I didn't know whether I was right or left. I picked left for about 20m (not shown on the track), thought I recognized the marsh and vegetation, and turned around. The map lost me again, and in a few minutes I popped out on the powerline. I looked for some attackpoint, but found none. I tried to see if I was in the right or left shallow reentrant. It looked like the west-most one to me, so I followed the low spot generally NE. I found 207, not 206, again thought I knew where I was, but I missed 206 as I went by. Maybe 100m too far, I turned around and starting going back-and-forth across the stream (these aren't shown well on the track). I was looking for a rock pile in the reentrant and a rocky pit uphill a little from the rock pile. When I found the rock pile, I was shocked at how low it was. There were a whole lot of unmapped rock features way taller than this thing. I looked uphill, and saw the flag. I think the first leg took me 38 minutes.
The track, viewed objectively, shows I overshot the control more than 100m, missed coming back and overshot 200m, and then left 1 directly south rather than SW (where I intended to go). Subjectively, I can't reconcile this track. It seemed farther from when I hit the marshy reentrant until I hit the powerline. It seems that the track shifts sideways from when I was going SW to when I was going NE. It seemed a lot more controlled to me than what this track shows.
Number 2. Seeing this track might explain a lot, but I still am not sure I trust it. When I got to the power line, I thought I was in the same spot as the first time. This clearly shows two different locations. It shows I was 100m east of where I thought I was when I entered the forest from the road. If that is true, it explains why I had so much trouble on this leg. What it doesn't explain is how different the terrain was from what the track shows---If I imagine following the GPS line, it doesn't match what I saw. I can't reconcile a 100m GPS error, so I'm going to assume it's basically correct. (Although take a look at the errors on the Friday Sprint map---changing direction has a way of getting 50+ meter errors.) Either way, it's not pretty. It was so frickin' green in here. That favors the GPS=true hypothesis. I'm gonna admit screwing up this leg. That's the simplest explanation. I forgot to mention that the obvious route here was to run the trail and use a rock as an attackpoint. After my experience on 1, I actually considered and rejected that route. I figured that missing that rock was very likely and that the straight route was less risky and shorter. I didn't anticipate or see the parallel error.
3 was a good leg. I took the trail around and just read the map right to the control. {Edit---Although it was fairly hard to navigate because of the low visibility.}
4 was another spot I decided to go straightish rather than bail out to the trail. My plan was to find 13 on the way, since that would be a very sure fix (since the setter and vetter and controller would have verified it). I didn't find 13. I found a parallel feature with a tape numbered 109, but no flag. I assumed I was about 100m NE of 13, but only because that feature is in the white and no course setter would use the other ones in the green. {Edit---I'm half joking about the green. The parallel feature W of my 13 is also in the white. I didn't know which one it was that had 109 in it.}
I couldn't read features other than a shallow stream bed, which I thought was the one I needed. I couldn't see a control, I so I kept going to the trail, where I went N to the junction---I did not detect the mapped saddle on the trail, even though the GPS says I passed it twice---And I was looking for it. It appears I was high about 50m on the way east across the hillside. It seemed to me I was following an obvious shallow streambed, but it's not mapped that way. Ran in to 4, then straight up to 5.
I probably wouldn't have used the feature at 5 because of the green. I didn't have any trouble though.
At this point I was approaching 2 hours, and I knew Mike would be finished already or finishing soon. I had been looking at 14 for some time. It just looked crazy. It was a vague hillside with a big green patch. When I saw it, my first thought was that it was a fairly boring, trivial leg. Basically you'd aim for this huge patch of first green (roughly 100m diameter) in a large white forest. Find your way through it, and when you pop out into the white forest on the other side, boom, it'll be right there.
The route I took from 5, might be completely different from the route from 13. Both are scary to me. The route from 13 gives you an apparent closer attackpoint (a stream-end/spring almost directly S of 14).
I set my compass and took off. Pretty soon I hit a big green patch, and soon after that I popped out into an area of white forest. I saw the formline spur shape, basically exactly like the control feature except the rocks were on the wrong side of the spur. Hmmmm. No feature on the map with with the rocks on the wrong side, but one possible parallel feature. I turned N and...didn't find the feature or the control. I turned W for 100m since there wasn't an obvious white forest. I found more green, so I went S. I saw a lot of rocks, so I went back along a white/green border. Found nothing. Gave up on 14. Headed to 15. When I popped out on the powerline sooner than I expected, it was clear all the rock detail I saw wasn't mapped.
Went to 15, said "Hi" to the people manning the stealth cam, then up to the finish. I was passed by one of the early Course 1 finishers. (Mike and I had early starts.) After I talked briefly (and very circuitously) to AZ, I kept my mouth shut and headed back to the car.
I don't want people to think I thought the course was terrible. I did make mistakes on it. I did think the placements tended toward extremely difficult. I missed all the complicated areas of the map. I am nearly certain that these areas would be much easier than the bland areas I had the most trouble with (1 and 4 and 14).
I have two complaints with the course. The first is that I felt the placements were bingoish. There just was't enough good map around the point features to justify using such small features. I probably would have used more reentrant junctions {Edit---and stream bends---point locations along linear features. Stuff you can find reliably.}. This felt very much like a long middle to me (even though I missed most of the course).
The second complaint is the map. I can understand bad vegetation mapping. What I can't understand is the mapper's decision to obfuscate the map by breaking the linear features when they were most subtle. A good example is the first "stream" I crossed on the way to 1. The map shows a stream to the west that stops. When I crossed it where there is no stream mapped, it had no depth, but it was an obvious streambed of rocks (the same color as the forest floor, sure, but it was there). I think this map would make a lot more sense with a few more linear features on it. Failing that, some form lines to help see the linear features would've helped.
{Third Complaint---Rock Features. I'm used to a sliding mapping standard, where the rocky areas are simplified, but the obvious stand-alone rocks are mapped when they're the only rocks around. I was amazed at the unmapped rock within 100m of 1 and 14, and to a lesser extent at 4.}