Discussion: Sterling Forest (W of Harriman)

Anyone scouted it out? More of the same? Or other areas around there?

Others know more, but there was an adventure race there, and I think I ran on an O' map, or one nearby.

check with Ed Hicks

NYARA had a navigation clinic there in April
http://www.nyara.org/nyara-clinics/mn_clinic_april...

Nice woods. Very remote even when compared to the Harriman 'backcountry' although it’s maybe 1/2 the size of Harriman. One reason is that there is a lot of off limits watershed lands in the area.
Plenty of excellent O potential. Terrain is like Harriman. Lots of bears. Had a large one (male?) shadow Liisa and me for 5 minutes last week. I think he wanted to eat our poodle Rusty.
Most of the woods are open to hunting right when O season would peak. Both in the spring and in the fall so that is a problem. It is a popular area for deer, bear, turkey, pheasant (stocked!) and small game hunting. They have a rule that hikers can only stay on marked trails. No following fire roads, no bushwhacking. I assume its so that they don't get shot accidentally.
There is a big visitors center that is usually empty but is very informative about the history of the area. Like the Iron mine that was dug under Sterling Lake!

If I am not mistaken, hunting is not allowed on Sundays in NY or NJ.

Creatures great and small should stay out of sight on sundays in NY if they are in season. There are lots of rules about when/where/what you can hunt. But you can basically hunt every day of the week.

Cool. Next question, since we have some local experts, what about Norvin Green, Ramapo Valley, Longpond Ironworks?

Think of Norvin Green and Longpond as extensions to Sterling forest. I'm not sure I know Ramapo Valley.. Do you mean Ramapo Reservation? While you are at it you should consider Waywanda State Park (south west of Sterling forest). Easy to access, gobs of parking, nice woods, facilities, some camping, etc,
http://maps.google.com/?ll=41.189643,-74.426794&sp...

Ed and Alan Young both have designs on Wawayanda. I have most of the lidar on disk already. Ed has an existing O-map of part of it. Definitely talk with them. Alan asked me about it earlier this spring, which is why I pulled the data, but Alan was planning to work it himself. Sterling would be an obvious extension, but might take some wrangling to locate the data on the NY side of the line. I can e-mail you the info I have from them.

Do you have any lidar data for Harriman?

Alan prepared a trail map of Wawayanda for NYARA's Mayday earlier this year. The woods are nice, but the bears are everywhere.

The only rumor I know about Harriman lidar is the Northeast Lidar Project proposal. Based on this the west side of the river hasn't been collected yet, and I haven't found any data online in all my searching. I also read somewhere that all of the NYC reservoirs' watersheds had been surveyed, but no idea what is covered or who to contact. There must be some overlap with the USMA surveys, so contacting the Campbels or USMAOC might be worth a shot.

A sweet area like Harriman/Sterling warrants its own flight with good specs (better than 1m posting, leaf-off) rather than relying on the marginal FEMA spec (1.4m posting) or worse that the Northeast project is likely to work to. I think HVO should go for it! One AR at Sterling could pay for the whole thing :)

I'm glad to see that New Jersey is getting some long-overdue attention.

Oh crap, are they across the border? Forget I asked.

Too late! You can't un-ring a bell! ;-)

Waywayanda was on the list of candidate sites for one of the WOC93 events until very late in the process. I think it was the last non-Harriman venue to be ruled out.

Because of the bears or because its in Jersey?

And Jersey is way way yonder?

Eddie, do you have any DEM data for Harriman? Why did Harriman win over Waywayanda? I am guessing more facilities, and more terrain variety.

I'm afraid I don't have any Harriman lidar data, nor have I seen any. The only data I know of on that side of the river is WP and the rumor about the NYC watershed surveys. The only thing I have that is close is Westchester Co on the east side of the river. I have Blue Mtn, and the data that was used to make the TT sprint map at Purchase. Also an area called Silver Lake/Cranberry Lake in White Plains that Neil has been playing with. There is already an HVO map of Cranberry Lake, which could do with a makeover using the lidar. Silver Lake looks more interesting, but the two areas are connected by (restricted access) watershed. Ed and Bob have access to the Suffolk Co lidar on Long Island and are actively working on maps there. Ed is also working a couple of other areas in Westchester Co.

If HVO is interested in working any of the Westchester areas, Alexei Azarov has a mapper looking for work this October, and I can probably get you a basemap in time.

Why did Harriman win over Waywayanda?

There were a lot of factors considered. Waywayanda would have been used for just one of the events, and a big issue was the advantage of having all of the maps in one compact bunch, which simplified a lot of logistics. The other place that was in the running for a while was Anthony Wayne, but that had multiple problems. Waywayanda was still being talked about when I got involved, but it was taken off the list soon enough that I never went there for a visit.

Eddie, not Lidar do you have any Harriman DEM (contour) data?

Eddie, I think you may only have part of BMtn.
How much does it cost to get high-spec Lidar flown?

There is a fair bit that could be mapped in Westchester alone (for which lidar exists already)...

I presume that the USGS 10m or 30m 7.5' DEMs exist for Harriman, just like any other place in the US (the old NED 1 and NED 1/3 sets now). These are useless though. The new NED 1/9 product is partially complete for the US and is apparently lidar derived, but is 3m res. - again bascially too low for O-maps, especially for an area like Harriman. You might make a reasonable rogaine map from 3m data. No coverage for Harriman yet.

However, since the NED 1/9 is derived from existing lidar sets (so far all Edit: (most) of those available on CLICK), you might as well just go to CLICK and get the higher-res lidar and skip the NED 1/9 altogether. I don't have any digital data, lidar or otherwise, covering Harriman.

Rogaine quality map of some of the unmapped harriman areas down by me would be a good start. What is the url for CLICK?

This is totally OT but here is a question? Does the NE US already have enough high quality areas to orienteer and would efforts be better spent keeping the existing forest maps up to date rather than continuing to find new forest areas to map? I.e., spend less on mapping and more on marketing or athletic development or coaching.

Southern Ontario by comparison has lots of great areas but only a few great maps yet the list of areas that clubs want to map continues to increase. I'm not sure why.

The CLICK viewer for lidar data availability : http://lidar.cr.usgs.gov/LIDAR_Viewer/viewer.php

The USGS seamless viewer for NED 1/9 arc second availability: http://seamless.usgs.gov/website/seamless/viewer.h...

Sadly, at least in QOC's area of operations, a lot of terrain is covered by NED 1/9 arc second with no data available through CLICK. But much of the NED data has only been available for a couple of months so maybe it's just a matter of time before CLICK catches up and Eddie's statement becomes accurate locally. In which case, we'll be able to redo a lot of our aging maps with much better contour basemaps than they originally had.

Update: if some of the lidar doesn't show up in the public domain, we'll presumably eventually bite the bullet and pay someone for lidar surveys of several of our older maps in VA.

Hammer - harking back to the conversation we had at West Point, I think we need way more maps, but not of uber forests miles from population centres. Every bit of mappable forest around New Haven would be a good start. Boston has got the right idea with the Park Os and mapping of most green stuff within the ringroads. I've been speaking to Nathan about starting a O' section of the Yale Outdoors club, but with only three areas within twenty mins drive (and one of them poorly mapped and quite thick) and neither of us owning cars, it's a bit of a non-starter. If East Rock and West Rock and the other parks were mapped, I think we'd have a lot more success. Pretty much every bit of green in Edinburgh is mapped, and it's much easier to get students to jog/cycle 10 mins to them for a midweek event then it is to get them to co-ordinate car sharing.

Of course, it depends on why you want to make more maps. But from a recruitment point of view, I think more local maps would make a huge difference. As for more uber forests, I'm not that bothered.

@hammer
That's more or less true around here. But the geographic spread of HVO, for example, is way too large (ok, it has subdivisions).

If you look at Westchester alone, we have Blue Mtn (mostly decent map), Ward Pound Ridge (photocopy of an old map), Saxon Woods (mostly good), Westmoreland Sanctuary (only been there at night), FDR (not very exciting and old), and the sprint map at Purchase. Withing twenty minutes of me (starting from the 287, say), there are only Saxon Woods and Purchase.

That's perhaps enough, but not a lot if you want to run local leagues and training.

As to your question about allocation of resources: if there were someone who would advertise and manage several local races (and perhaps a larger adventure race) per year for +/-$5k, I think that would be worth considering. I'm not sure there are qualified people who would be available/interested.

To get a great map, unless the old map was great at some point, it's not (afaik) much extra effort to do somewhere new (assuming there is a good base).

Ha, I must have taken >15 minutes to write that :)

What Becks said.

So there are enough uber maps but not enough local maps?

CLICK is notoriously slow in updating its reserves. For example all of PA's statewide coverage has been available through PASDA since Dec 2010, and much of the southern and central parts have been available by request from the state for over a year before that, and yet neither of the central and eastern sets are available through CLICK. I even asked the PA folks if the data had been sent to CLICK, since its advertised to be on the PAMAP website and as I recall they said it had. Who knows.

I'm not convinced that all of the NED 1/9" data really is lidar-derived at this point. I think some of it comes from other sources, although you get a different answer depending on which USGS website you look at. The MD data could be, since we know that alot of the state has coverage and not all of it available through CLICK (Balto Co for example sells its coverage). Yet the NED 1/9 viewer shows it. Same thing with WVa. Three or four counties are known to have lidar coverage, but as far as I can tell from the WVa GIS sites there is no statewide coverage yet. But there seems to be NED 1/9 for the whole state. This WVa site says the NED 1/9 product comes from a statewide photogrammetric survey. While this particular USGS Seamless Data Warehouse page implies that the NED 1/9" is lidar-derived. The photo-derived WVa data has a nominal vertical accuracy of +/- 10ft, which is pretty awful compared to +/- 18cm for typical lidar sets.

Regardless of the source, the NED 1/9" 3m gridded data is not really good enough for orienteering basemaps.

Uber vs Local: is not necessarily the issue...

If I want to get the Peekskill community orienteering, putting on a series of events in Blue Mtn would make sense. For White Plains not-yet-orienteers, Blue Mtn is a ways away (once-off, fine).

It would be very helpful if all the maps being used were accurate and up-to-date though, so course-planning could be done from the armchair.

When it comes to searching for Lidar data I have found www.lidardata.com more user friendly than the usgs Lidar data viewer http://lidar.cr.usgs.gov/LIDAR_Viewer/viewer.php

I walked through Brooklyn Heights on a Sunday morning and there was a running person in sight continuously for over an hour. Always someone running. I must have seen several hundred, mostly under 45. Also, lots of families with kids.

Just a thought.

@Tundra/Desert: Are you suggesting a Brooklyn Heights sprint map?

I'm not suggesting anything. At all. We're all adults and know how to.

Then what, exactly, was the point of your post?

As I recall it, the USMAOC Lidar has (had as of 2009, when I skedaddled--might be worth a check with COL Mike Hendricks (contact info on their website)) very little overlap into adjacent areas--either Black Rock Forest or Harriman SP. Basically, think of squares oriented N-S/E-W about 2-km per side. Lay that on top of the USMA reservation boundaries and whatever overlap was necessary to cover the reservation is what they have data on. I think it actually misses the very northern parts of the USMAOC maps (parts that are in Black Rock Forest).

A Prospect Park map would be pretty interesting.

There is one. Gregb showed it to me years ago. A Russian orienteer who lives in brooklyn did it. Not sure who it was.

It was Mark Becker who made it.

So there are maps of Prospect Park, Central Park, and Forest Park... how many events per year do these average? Just curious.

This story about a tree map of Central Park was on Morning Edition last week. I wonder if these guys knew the O-map existed before they started?

When I lived in Queens, the "Two Guys From Queens" (Greg and me) would usually hold a meet every other season or so. Seems like the Forest Park is a forgotten map at this point.

That brings me back to... being more explicit, for Guy...

If I want to get the Peekskill community orienteering... or—?—

Brooklyn community.
Queens community.
Manhattan community.

Again we're all adults. Who can prioritize and make decisions. Some things are fun to do because you enjoy doing them, some are fun because your friends will enjoy them, and some are good for the greater good. I'm sorry and I didn't try to tell anyone what to do.

P.S. Let me assure those of you who won't step foot inside any larger city (and there are a lot) that these runningfolk who choose to inhabit and raise families in say Brooklyn Heights, Kew Gardens, or Washington Heights are perfectly good orienteering material. They have legs and brains and they seem to like to run in parks and a small subset of this large number can certainly be brought to appreciate locating checkpoints with a map.

Coincidentally, I'm in NYC at a conference this week, and have been running in Central Park for the first time ever. I'm astonished by the sheer number of people running around the main paved park loop in the late afternoon. The running etiquette seems to say to run the loop counterclockwise, but not knowing this, I ran clockwise.

As a very conservative estimate, I would say I met another runner going the opposite direction every 5 seconds on average, for the entirety of my 53 minute run. As Vlad points out, that's a huge number of runners!

637 runners.

that is a slow day in central park. on mothers day it was 5 wide for the entire 6 mile loop.

So we have maps and we have a lot of runners. Is the reason that these essential ingredients have not precipitated a flowering of New York City orienteering participation is due to a dearth of events (a third necessary component) due to the reluctance of suburban orienteers to put them on?

That seems to be partially implied. But, I wonder if the orienteering output function has some other more important variables that we are pretending don’t exist?

Variables we are pretending don't exist or are there existing variables that we don't know about?

If I were to be an intelligent lifeform residing in New York City and leading a productive lifestyle, how would I know orienteering exists?

Could be both, probably.

Obviously, a low yield applied to a large volume, can still generate good numbers. But, what it the yield is lower than we expect?

Why do people live in NYC vs. Laramie? I know, I know—all sorts of reasons. If I wanted to find out why, and was the marketing type, I would think that some sort of conjoint analysis would be effective in teasing out implicit preferences.

Why does one restaurant become The Odeon and another closes after 12 months? It isn’t just the food.

Anyway, it has been asserted maps + meets + big city = orienteering enlightenment I’m not so sure.

It works in Europe. People in NYC are perhaps closer to Eurofolk than to the rest of the country in terms of their mindset. Of course, there is also the gorilla of government funding (aka meddling) in Europe, which isn't contributed by any level of the government in the U.S., so it may not work the same way.

The "not so sure" is partly because it hasn't been tried in over 40 years that orienteering has been around in the U.S. And that is because club tend to serve their members, who tend to not live in cities.

We need comparative statics.

What's there to compare with? I'm back to my question 4 posts above.

Which is the right question. There have to be at least 50k people willing to try orienteering in NYC alone, if only they knew...

j-man - advertising is missing in your equation.

We need to get the NYC hipsters involved. Hipsters are all about doing things most people have never heard of. Anyone got an ironic orienteering slogan and some PBR laying around?

"Professional Bull Riders, get tough with the toughest sport on Earth." ?

Ha!

From the next Google result on the list....

"The beer experienced a sales revival in the early 2000s after a two decade-long slump, largely due to its increasing popularity among the 20-something demographic in cities such as Brooklyn, New York; ...As a result, it has become popularly associated with the contemporary hipster subculture.

PBR, what a waste of a can....
Despite Hamilton's reputation in some small cirles as the Brooklyn of Canada, the only athletic hipsters I've ever met have been in Edmonton.

Tundra: are you looking to attract intelligent lifeforms in big cities with a good 10km time? Or will warm bodies do?

At this point I'll settle for anything... but I don't think urban orienteering possesses much appeal to those with grossly inadequate 10 km times.

Re: Forest Park. Actually there has been a regular, annual O-event there, usually in the Fall. It has been run by a Boy Scout troop, and, with assistance from one HVO-er -- who lives in NJ -- has included Orange & Green courses, in addition to White and Yellow.

A big problem with that map -- like many others -- is that it is badly in need of updating. Said HVOer has done some limited updates over the years -- using white-out and colored pencils. There might be an OCAD file somewhere.

A big problem with that map -- like many others -- is that it is badly in need of updating.

and in an earlier episode...

I'm glad to see that New Jersey is getting some long-overdue attention.

Since I'm obviously in favor of government meddling, I always wondered what would happen if Orienteering USA had adopted a less laissez-faire, more active-management approach to its clubs. (It is of course possible clubs would rebel and quit.) A part of this approach could be, for example, limiting the map loan/grant funds to specific projects.

I think you should visit this page to see what is possible.
http://street.orienteering.com.au/

Some random notes.

During summer there is an event almost every day, sometimes more.
See fixture here.
http://street.orienteering.com.au/

These events are much better attended than the State forest orienteering events. The Wednesday evening series regularly has 200 competitors.
See attendance here.
http://street.orienteering.com.au/Common/Attendanc...

The attendance of these events in one city outnumbers attendance at all other orienteering events in the host State. The national participation stats are here;
http://www.orienteering.asn.au/gfolder/administrat...
Don't look for street orienteering, but "Evening events". That's 25,000 out of 65,000 nationally, and doesn't include weekend street events. This number includes summer evening events once a week in Sydney and some street events in Newcastle.

A project has commenced to write an organisers and promoters manual to spread this version of the sport beyond its current limited geographic base.
http://www.orienteering.asn.au/news/?ItemID=6798

There is little evidence of street orienteering acting as a pathway into forest orienteering. This form of the sport is all that many people need for their orienteering hit, and they can be quite committed. There is a Millenium club recognising 500 and 1000 attendances in the current Millenium.
http://www.vicorienteering.asn.au/parkstreet/mille...

Related question. Does this form of the sport reduce attendance at forest events by providing a more convenient opportunity for a navigation sport experience? I am not sure of the answer to this. I will observe though that during the period of growth of street orienteering, traditional event attendances from the same city declined.

There is a possibility that the sport will eventually outgrow traditional orienteering structures and become independent.

This should provide some hard evidence for the discussion.

You have nice, relatively clean, relatively crime-free streets down under. We do too, but it didn't use to be like this, and therein may lie perhaps a significant part of the problem.

Yes urban orienteering is the go. But that wasn't the topic.

I don't know where Sterling Forest is, and if the following doesn't make sense then just ignore me. But around here there's a forum topic on dream areas that someone would like to see mapped. Seems to serve a need.

Meanwhile, areas that are used month in month out, because they are reasonably close to where people live, get no maintenance. Inexperienced planners are put to work on our worst maps. (The best planners get to do the big events on the new maps.)

Funny that. With maps in the computer, and all the tools now available, you'd think that we would gradually improve. Doesn't seem to happen.

Guy, tak to Greg about Forest Park. He has it on Ocad and should be very up-to-date

Seems to serve a need.

Yes indeed, but at what cost?

Old thread I know. I was playing with New Jersey data and Norvin Green area, googled it and ended up here.



I matched green using Shepherd Lake vegetation mapping, it should not be too bad.

An other nearby area is getting crunched right now and will follow.

Edit:
Abram S. Hewitt State Park
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-jnd7wppXSq0/VSK...

Edit 2:
Storm King Mountain, NY:
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-nH3ek5m_6yc/VSL...

Before this thread disappears off the front page I wanted to pay tribute to Jagge for these maps.
A couple years ago I had the pleasure of going out on the Sterling map (posted elsewhere?). I found the contours solid, certainly good enough for training runs, but the vegetation rather imprecise. Granted I was looking at the map more like a mapper than runner.

I hope to make a visit to these additional areas, which I have been curious about for decades but never had the opportunity to visit, other than a drive-by of Norvin Green in the 80's?
I look forward to see the progress of the mapping system, especially the green vegetation seems more detailed.

I hope others take advantage of this opportunity.
Thanks Jagge!

It might have been part of Alan's big map. He used this as the base for an AR map some years ago. The green areas are state/public holdings, not veg. Private property boundaries shown in grey. The obvious diagonal is the NY/NJ line.

If it was one of my maps the green sure did not have much to do with actual vegetation either. That's one of the reasons I ended up re-writing the vegetation algorithm. So its all new now - but it does not mean it is necessarily any better.

Before I did these latest maps I checked the way green ends up comparing result against this map:
http://www.mapsurfer.com/images/olimg/nj100001.jpg
The way green ended up:
http://routegadget.net/misc/newjersey_greenmapping...

So it's not any better than that. But if you use enough imagination you may see some resemblance there. Note that it is still not trying to find vegetation edges as one might like and expect it to be done for mapping. It is trying to estimate how crappy it is, so one would know to not plan any legs to the worst areas.

I don't think the Ringwood map has ever been updated for vegetation, since it was produced for the 2000 NAOC.

Based on a run of a few years back, I can tell you that the marsh with "15" near the NE end on the Ringwood map is at least as green as depicted. But the synthetic map didn't appear to pick that up at all.

Lake => field is interesting. Is it that difficult to discern open water?

Well, isn't that marsh green in the synthetic map too?
http://routegadget.net/misc/ringwood.gif

There is usually no vegetation on lakes, so it is yellow (what else could it be?) unless points are classified as water, like in this dataset.

With water points classified as water map end up lookiing like this. Usually I use some vector data like Openstreetmap to get biggest lakes an some roads and paths. Like those New Jersey areas here.

Just consider this to be a winter map, when the lakes are frozen, and the yellow makes perfect sense.