Discussion: NEOC map

My routes/comments from day 1 of the NEOC A meet.

Just for a bit of perspective, here's the old black-and-white map from 1976, and the fancy color map from 1985.

Does anyone know what the vegetation symbol "green with white dots" was on this weekend's Wells State Park map? There is plenty of light, medium, and dark green on the map. My course took me thru or near this "green with white dots" only once and I didn't notice it being anything but normal mountain laurel.

When I was looking over the map afterwards, I noticed this vegetation symbol that I wasn't familiar with and I noticed the "red boulders" on the NE corner of the map and the red buildings and boulders on the NW corner...these I assume are some OCAD remnant of field-checking notes.

Having wondered about this "green with white dots" vegetation symbol, I purposely went by one section while pulling controls, and it seemed to be thick saplings, but no thicker than the areas on either side. In another section, it was mountain laurel...again, the same as the mountain laurel mapped on either side in a conventional dark green. Could this be another remnant of field-checking?

The green with white dots in the 0CAD file is symbol 402.1, which is described as "Forest with scattered clumps". In looking over the map last year, it didn't strike me as particularly different from normal laurel, either.

The purple stuff in the corners is probably my fault. Pete Bundschuh made some map corrections while doing the course setting, and I guess he put some of them in using a purple symbol for some reason, to distinguish them from the original fieldwork. I should have spotted this and corrected it before getting the maps printed, but I was in too much of a rush. I noticed it at the last minute, but since it was not near any controls I decided it was benign.

My routes/comments from day 2 of the NEOC A meet.

Upon drawing my course last night, it appeared that the actual start triangle, on the ground, for Day 2 was about 40-50m west along the small trail from that shown on the map. I did drift a bit at the start, but not as much as I would expect without this shift. Lyn had a similar experience with the Brown map.

Seems right about the day 2 triangle... also, Blue 6 (#316) was most likely one boulder to the NW. And, the Blue map exchange leg, in fact, ended in another control, requiring navigation, and the map exchange point should have been included in the control descriptions as Control 10. These are small picks—the courses on both days were remarkable, and the event was definitely worth coming for!

Green X control 7 was also #316 and seemed to come up fast. I expected to see the boulder on the downslope but it was up on the flat of the big spur. Not a problem, saved a contour of climb. :-) Fun course - thanks Charlie (and J-J and everyone else involved).

Valerie has kindly set up RouteGadget for Saturday's short and relay courses at Spring Rock. We hope to get Sunday's map up there soon. Thanks, Valerie! (and J-J!)

You can use the RG for the Spring Rock Festival with or without splits. Select "Draw your route", pick a course, & type your name in. At minimum, enter your finish time. Enter splits, if you have them - cumulative time for each in MMMSS. If you don't put splits in, ones will be assigned automatically based on the length of the leg. Draw your route, type in any comments, and save. When drawing your route, make sure the blue line has hit the center of the circle before moving onto the next control. If your route won't save, it is probably becasue you missed a center of a circle... Let me know if you have any problems/questions. You will need to have JAVA installed & enabled to play along.

Another interesting aspect of the Wolf's Den map was the printing of water features. Appears that NEOC was making up for the lack of the Cliff Road on Saturday with the appearance of the Stream Road on this map. All the streams, water features etc have a distinct blackness, as in road, trail, funny shaped buildings.

Welcome to the world of laser. The worst sample I saw was last year at an event in a very large state. There were numerous intermittent streams, obviously going down reentrants, and also numerous trails, often going up and down reentrants. Impossible to tell which one was which.

I won't fault lasers as we have had consistently good results with laser printing for a number of years.