Discussion: High Sierra rogaine

Rogainers, adventure racers, and other adventurous souls:

BAOC has plans, and has received preliminary park approval, for a 24h rogaine this August 27-28, 2016. We will attempt to get North American or US Champs status for this race.

The event will take place in the Sierra Nevada mountains of CA, between Yosemite and Kings Canyon NPs. Elevation range is 7000-9000 ft. The terrain is primarily open forest and granite slab. The steepness is not as severe as in many CA mountain areas, and there is no poison oak.

More details to appear soon on the BAOC website, which will be your best source of information. Apologies in advance if I don't respond to comments here as I'm not a frequent social media user.

Coolness, Dennis.

Dinkey Creek?

Preliminary info is on the meet web page : http://baoc.org/wiki/Schedule/2016/Sierra_Rogaine

Cool. Looking forward to it.

Interesting for sure.

Can't wait - hope to make this my first 24 hour rogaine.

We now have official park approval! The event team is mostly assembled and we are applying for North American Championship status for this race. Registration should be available within a week - link to come

Where do I register?

I believe this event is now under the administration of Nav-X Challenge, which is a group made up of members of BAOC, GCO, terraloco, and others. They don't have registration set up for the rogaine yet; probably waiting until after their inaugural event April 24 at Briones Regional Park in the SF East Bay. They've annouced that the rogaine will be at Shaver Lake in Fresno County.

Their website is www.navxchallenge.com.

Thanks.

And good to see they use a term other then "rogaining".. :) "Navigation racing" does not require as much explanation to new people around here...

Update: we are officially sanctioned as the North American Rogaine Championships for 2016!

Registration will be up and running very soon.

Is requirement to have a team for 24 hr imposed by insurance? I signed up, but not sure about a teammate, and going alone is kind of fun, I like that...

The issue in general is that with a Rogaine, the scale of the area is such that if somebody gets hurt, searching for them becomes very difficult. And there have been cases of people from all over the ability spectrum getting hurt, and it being a good thing that they had a teammate there to either help them get out, or go for help. I don't think insurance has said anything specifically, but it's a reasonable requirement for organizers to impose to manage their responsibility.

For getting hurt I carry a satellite PLB beacon. Will be fairly easy to find the body.

Is not it about personal responsibility? And for adventure races, searchable terrain was probably larger, even with overall path predetermined. People did weird route choices.. :)

If you want personal responsibility, go ahead out into the wilderness on your own (I do all the time). Organizers don't want to have a body recovery on their hands.

The OUSA and IRF rules define a "team" as having two to five members. I presume that means that an individual would not be eligible for an award.

You may not care about getting an award, but as a meet official I would care about not doing a search and rescue (or recovery) when I want to be on my way home. No waiver is going to do me any good if I leave the scene without doing what I can to make sure everyone is out of the forest.

So, how about letting an individual purchase a course map? Officially he / she is not a participant and is not paying for event participation, eg food, drink, results download, or any other support. The fee could even be a bit lower to clearly indicate that the person is not a participant, only purchasing a copy of the map for personal use at a time of their own choosing.

I am not sure why organizers would feel personally responsible for an adult making well informed decisions. I guess it is an American thing. Oh, well. Will need to sucker somebody into walking with me. As far as award eligibility, I am not of award speed anyway. It is just much more fun to participate in an organized race than just walking around.

Sorry for highjacking the thread.

If you've organized an event of this sort, and one of the competitors doesn't come back (and his car appears to still be there), I don't know many people who would just shrug and say, "well, I guess he's out there making well informed decisions". Indications are that somebody is in trouble, and that something should be done to help. This being America, yeah, there's also the chance that there would be a lawsuit if you just packed up and left, but even without that, most organizers are going to feel an obligation to find him.

On the other hand, unlike some other types of events, there's typically not any list of required "survival" equipment.

I hear you.
Interestingly the only adventure racing death I know about was when a team mate dropped a boulder on the victims head when descending. (And in my personal opinion it was their damn fault, but organizers still got in trouble). And PLB+Spot would be much more useful for S&R, but obviously can't make them mandatory.

Personal experience showed me it's good to have a partner when in remote mountain territory (B.C.) and get seriously injured during a rogaine. We did personal extraction which would have been very difficult solo. Maybe someone else would come by, maybe not.

I can think of a few people who would have a very different opinion about that AR death, Offwidth.

I was at that race. The story is more complicated and something like that could happen in an orienteering or rogaining event so I'd avoid judgement.

I agree with the suggestion for GPS trackers for rogaining. I manage HQ for Wilderness Traverse, Canada's largest 24+ hr adventure race. It is mandatory to carry a tracker and I can't imagine operating our wilderness race without it - and it's a simpler point-to-point event where teams pass through staffed checkpoints. (Sure, races were managed without trackers in the past but it's similar to making a car without seat belts once they've been invented.)

We include the tracker (Delorme Inreach with 2-way communications) in the entry fee but there is some concern to keep the sport of rogaining very inexpensive so I don't see it happening any time soon.

I'd support the use of trackers in rogaine and even longer or more remote orienteering. From my limited search and rescue experience, knowing the location of the subject makes the rescue waaaay faster. In a recent search, we could simply hike directly to the subjects due to solid position info. This could also increase the chances that the subject is in good condition, or less bad condition than if out there longer. In a search in Maine, an Appalachian trail hiker was found two years later by a logger, despite an extensive search that managed to get within 100 meters of her tent. To be frank, searching more than a handful of likely paths of travel doesn't seem to be terribly successful. If someone gets two miles off route in a remote area as the woman in Maine did, search can be low probability of success without location info. Rogaine controls provide some location versus time info, but not for anyone who makes a huge navigational error. Can happen. I carry a Spot tracker when hiking alone, especially since I'm often off trail.

Treetop?

events longer than 6 hrs. that allow individual competition will not get sanctioned by the OUSA rogaining committee. US and North American champs must be santioned by OUSA in order to meet IRF requirements for events that serve to prequalify entrants for WRC. this was reviewed this year in OUSA committee, and applied to the Sierra event proposal by unanimous committee vote. any non sanctioned event rules are up to the organizer, no approvals are required in terms of the rogaining committee or ousa for those events.
the Sierra event should be an excellent experience - the venue area is open navigable forest in a very scenic environment. for those coming to the area from other locales, there is a little park about two hours away - yosemite. even more reason to register soon.

Treetop?

Typo fixed. ..swipe to type has its downsides when I don't catch such things. ..should have been two (go figure).

Thanks to NavX and the BAOC team for a wonderful event! We very much enjoyed the challenge, the beautiful venue, the organization of all the event support, and hanging out with friends old and new at the has house. Hope we get to do this again!

Results? :) Most curious about the Mixed Super Vets, but a summary of all the best teams would be cool too!

Echoing Victoria's comments. Many thanks to NavX, BAOC, Dennis, Bill, Heidi and everyone that helped organize the event.
It was hard terrain and tough course, not made any easier by the 9000+ feet elevation and the warm weather :)

Yes, thanks to everyone for running such a great, massive, fun event. Hopefully the police officer that showed up just before awards didn't sour things.

We really enjoyed this rogaine a lot! It had great terrain, a good map, and very nice course setting. It was a pretty physically challenging event because of lots of climb, and at fairly high elevation, but the weather was pleasant (25 or 30F cooler than in Fresno, just 50 miles away, but a mile and a half lower), the scenery lovely, and the route choice and navigation fun and feasible. If you didn't make it to this one, and BAOC/NavX hold another rogaine there in the near future, it should definitely go on your to-do list. We're planning to go back if we have another chance, and maybe check out more of the southern end of the mapped area, where rumor has it that the woods were even nicer!

Results are up on the Nav-X Facebook page.

24 hour results here.

Apparently I'm Facebook challenged...Couldn't find anything besides the invitation. Nice website, though.