Discussion: Orienteering at Augusta National Golf Club?

Not bloody likely but we can dream what it would look like

Thanks Gord.
This will make great video-O this weekend.

If you are a fan of orienteering at golf courses, closed
UA golf course is open to public as a running park.

https://rolltide.com/sports/2016/6/10/facilities-p...

That seems like a much better use of a golf course.

Yurets, Now Don't tell me there is no orienteering map of that park. What a great venue for people to get started!

Gordhun, LOL, Tuscaloosa area could be the Mecca of o'ring...but it lacks one tiny little ingredient...guess which one?

PS: I am still shocked the park was not selected for the World Games -- located about 1 hr from B'ham via I-20. It is truly spectacular for sprint/middle, with lots of natural and artificial contour features etc

ticks?

Plenty of them, plus snakes active year-long. Try again

A volunteer interested in setting some courses?

Rules to ban bullies and trolls?

Canadians have always been bullies, and played dirty, + used help of corrupt referees to boot....that was their only hope against the Red Machine. See here, from 1987 Canada Cup

You totally got me! I clicked on the subject line at lightning speed thinking both that this could not be true but what if?

After that, I was totally expecting Rick Astley.

@yurets: I was at that game#3 in '87 in Hamilton (and game#2 that went to double OT). Those two games were some of the best hockey ever played. All three games of the finals were 6-5. Two very evenly matched teams. Thanks for the memories as this is one of my fave memories in hockey history

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruloAuFazcg
(you can briefly see my arm at the 0:34 mark in the video).

Sorry Gord for making a golf thread switch to hockey but yurets has highlighted a great moment in Canadian sport.

Have at it!

A lot of the golf courses in these parts are owned by the municipalities. We have been able to use some of the courses for night-O on the grounds that we are local residents as well and the golfers don't play in the dark.

Perhaps the golf courses that have T**** in their name will become available for orienteering in the not-too-distant future... ;-D

We had a small city-owned golf course close a few years ago and I mapped it; until the city stopped mowing most of the fairways, it was a really fun place to run. (Head-high grasses/weeds have since grown up on the fairways. Sad.)
About a quarter of the park surrounding the parking lot is still mowed, and is still really fun to run on.

There are probably birds that like it now.

Mow paths and have maze orienteering

Ecological succession applies to golf courses, some day it will be a nice piece of wilderness.

OK Gord, have you prepared an O map of the golf course for the upcoming US Open, less than three weeks away?
The Country Club, near Boston covers some very good Nordic/ NEOC style terrain, along with some O connections.

Just yesterday evening NEOC conducted an O event about one mile away.

On the other hand, about 50(?) years ago I believe PG played this course regularly as the home course for the Crimson golf team. Perhaps he or others can confirm.

The US Senior Open takes place not far from Bethlehem, PA (Saucon Valley Country Club, which I've been on all sides of, but never through/in) next month. I don't think they'd ever allow it to be used for orienteering, though.

EricW, I have been working on now and then an orienteering map of the Country Club and the terrain is quite stunning.
I put the project away a few months ago when other things came up and I learned that apparently since the latest LiDAR and now the course had undergone a bit of a remodeling. Now that you ask I'll get back to it.
JanetT the thing with these orienteering maps of famous golf courses I know they will never be used for orienteering events. They are fantasy maps. It is just fun and, with the right tools, very easy to make the maps.
I do hear that some like to print out the maps and follow along the TV commentary. I sometimes like to print out the map and do field corrections while watching the event on TV.

Sounds like a better reason to watch golf than the golf itself - updating an orienteering map that you'll never be able to use.

Recreational armchair mapping. Mine was the local army arsenal. You would love it tRicky. I doubt you would get permission to hold a sprint MTBO there though.

Yes I've always wanted to map all the bases I've visited but getting permission to run any sort of orienteering would be problematic.

We have a small golf course that’s been closed for years and a local church bought the property. We have been given permission to use it for several smaller events and it’s been a really fun area for sprint races, butterfly loop courses etc. We make a donation to the church each time we use it and they hav bathrooms and a big parking lot so it’s a nice venue. It’s called Olson mansion for the historic house on the property

We also have a couple of frisbee golf locations as part of city park maps and those can be especially disorienting in the dark.

Cascade has also gotten permission from city owned courses to do some night I’d but the greens are always marked as pink out of bounds to avoid foot traffic across the most sensitive areas.

Olson mansion retired golf course:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/592aivqanbgii9z/Course%2...

Nice information Sherart77. Lucky you. The churches around here are busy cashing on their excess land by selling for assisted housing where there are large government grants currently available.
I also collected that Tahoma club logo for my collection of animal themed orienteering club logos.

@tRicky, Kapooka Base in Wagga would make an excellent sprint map but, as you say, getting permission to run there would be problematic. The back of the base also has some really nice granite but it's in the middle of the firing range....

Plus you'd have to stand fast everytime an officer walked past. Kapooka also has a golf course to orienteer on.

Funnily enough we did do "orienteering" at Kapooka. They have a number of mailboxes out in the field as permanent markers. Our section came in last place out of our platoon and even then we only finished after I was told to take over the remaining nav legs and essentially did away with 'the army way'.

The UK has run sprint events on military bases. Not sure about other countries?

Think I mentioned this before but the 2018 (Austria) and 2019 (Denmark) WMTBOC had their sprint and relay respectively on military institutions.

@gordhun Fun fact the terrain lines in the bear logo are the real Mt Rainier terrain lines. We have great views of it from all over town. “Tahoma” is the fist peoples original name for Mt Rainier. Tahoma high school mascot is the bears. And we regularly see black bears around the school where we practice.

Many events have been held on the US Miltary Academy (West Point), US Air Force Academy, and Quantico Marine Base properties, and before my day, at Fort Devens in Massachusetts. The 1997 Veterans World Cup (predecessor to the World Masters Champs) was at Camp Ripley, also an active military installation. There are likely others.

There have been a few events on the former munitions dump at Caerwent, which is now used as a military training area. The abandoned buildings are particularly atmospheric at night.

https://www.baoc.routegadget.co.uk/rg2/#198&co...
https://www.jk.routegadget.co.uk/rg2/#84

When were events held at the USAF Academy?

I orienteered on the premises of the US Army's Fort A. P. Hill in December 1976 (I believe, might have been 1977--perhaps there is somebody who could confirm the date, such as anyone who was active in QOC back then and who is still alive and on AP today, or maybe dcady will see this and pull out the map from his collection--which unlike my collection, is sorted and organized--as he did when I visited him a few years ago). It was my first national event (as we say now, back then it was an A-meet). Having first orienteered just over a year previously, I didn't have proper O-clothes yet (which at that time would have been the nylon-pajama style) and it was chilly, so I ran in dungarees (once again my terminology betrays my age).

Like many things in life, civilians being able to orienteer on military property has become more complicated and rule-constrained over the years. I remember in the late 1970s visiting the Fort Devens that J-J mentions, I think to do some vetting for an upcoming local meet, without having to go through any gates or present any identification. Which doesn't mean I was authorized to be there, just that there weren't so many fences and military police back then. There was, however, a sign "Warning: Drop Zone" whose significance escaped me as I went about my vetting, until substantial numbers of troops parachuted down very near where I was. I took that as a signal that maybe I shouldn't be there on that particular afternoon after all, and skedaddled as quickly as I could.

Another warning that applied to those of us orienteering at Fort Devens in those days was that sections of the map immediately adjacent to the area used for orienteering were labelled "Keep Out: Impact Zone". I was (and admittedly still am) a bit of a pedant about the usage of words, and it bugged me back then that the word "effect" was more and more being usurped by "impact". If I'd have had my pedantic way, "impact" would be reserved for actual impacts. Of course, marketeers and the rest of the world have long since ignored me and beaten "impact" into wimpy uselessness. But in my Quixotic crusade, I remember that more than once, when subjected to some mamby-pamby mumbo-jumbo about the impact of a sales brochure or some such, I would exclaim, "Stop saying 'impact' when you simply mean 'effect'! 'Impact' is for things like THIS [stabbing a finger at my Fort Devens map] where you could suffer the impact of an artillery shell!"

Is this off topic? I suppose one might be impacted by a golf ball at Augusta National, whether playing or spectating.

There are literally hundreds of fantastic words now barraged into wimpy uselessness due to impactful misuse.

RMOC local events routinely take place at the Air Force Academy. I don't remember if there's just one map, or if there are two.

Regarding "I orienteered on the premises of the US Army's Fort A. P. Hill in December 1976 (I believe, might have been 1977--perhaps there is somebody who could confirm the date, such as anyone who was active in QOC back then and who is still alive and on AP today". I believe Quantico did have a map of Fort A.P. Hill long, long ago and it was also used for the Boy Scout National Jamboree. We don't have a current map of it and there isn't anyone active in Quantico from that time period who could say the date."

Quantico Orienteering Club (named after the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia) has used Military bases for many years (including Quantico MCB where we have 8 maps of different areas, and Fort Belvoir where all our maps have expired). Access and permits have gotten much more complicated and expensive in the last 20 years (i.e. since 9/11 when they started tightening security). FYI: my backyard touches a military base and we informally use that for summer series events.

my backyard touches a military base and we informally use that for summer series events

What a great idea. Nothing can possibly go wrong here.

My recollection of the history of the Ft. A. P. Hill map is that it was one of three maps surveyed for the 1974 CISM championships, the other two maps being Pocahontas St. Pk, and Westmoreland St. Pk.

I believe the A. P. Hill map was used for training, while Pocahontas was used for the Individual race and Westmoreland for the Relay. Pocahontas was later used in 1977 for the US Championships.

My recollection confirms most of this, with no disputes.
At the time, these were probably the best maps in the country, with the original Ward Pound Ridge being the only other contender?
II believe Kaspar Fosser's grandfather(?) Per Fosser, was part of that mapping crew.