Discussion: The Champs are underway!

... from dry, open woods above Naches, Washington, we are posting almost live on Facebook. Fifty-one checkpoints are awaiting intrepid adventurers; 25 teams are contesting the Championship in the 24-hour category. It is alternatingly cloudy and sunny, with temps around 17°C; it will be around freezing at night and full moon is shining through the thin clouds!

Results will be available promptly.

The Champs are now over and here are the preliminary results. North American Rogaining Champion titles go to Pēteris Lediņš and Nikolay Nachev (Open Men); Jackie Bonn and Wade Tokarek (Open Mixed); and Becky Quinlan and Vivian Volz (Open Women). The top team of Lediņš /Nachev reached 46 of 51 checkpoints, for 2510 of 2700 possible points.

Strong performance from Lediņš and Nachev! They are a force.

Anybody else having trouble with the Facebook page - content unavailable etc.

You have to be logged in, don't you?

What is Facebook?

I'm not sure what is it exactly so far ....

Correct, the settings on the MerGeo page are such that you have to be signed in to Facebook to see the content.

Oh it was far more sinister... don't ask, don't tell. The above links should be working for everyone right now, you don't have to be signed in.

Any word on winners path/sequence or skipped controls?

Thanks to all the organizers. It was a well-run competition. Contour and vegetation information was the most accurate I have seen on a rogaine map. Full moon and open land were nice.
Struggling uphill at night without lights, I used a tree as an attackpoint. Never done that at night before. Thanks Eric.

The complete results of the North American Rogaining Championships are now available.

Winning routes will be published if the winners volunteer their checkpoint sequences or tracks; without e-punching, there is no easy way for the organizers to deduce the routes.

No e-punching? You guys are living in the past, or in Western Australia.

Well, there exist resource constraints. MerGeo delivered a state-of-the-art lidar-derived map, a thoughtful course with plentiful options, and nutritious, wholesome, filling meals.

How would any of those things -- together or separately -- preclude e-punching? Where's the trade-off?

For one, MerGeo doesn't own e-punch units. Sure, they could rent them or whatever, but they are a small operation and they focused on maps, courses, and food. I think don't think any MerGeo event I've been to has had e-punching, now that I think about it.

Echoing T/D's comments. The map was great, Weather was really enjoyable throughout the day with sunny, not too hot breezy day. Night temps did not feel like close to freezing. Maybe because we were moving at a good pace. We ran out of water in two out of 5 water stops, but this might be because of the 4 and 9 hour categories that have passed through the closer to the finish water stops during the day. Ran without water for close to 3 hours. Thankfully found a non dry stream (rare chance in Eastern Washington in the end of summer), for the first time and it was night through the second so did not miss water too much.

Probably we would have done a bit better with more water though.

As for the course, there were some choices to be made, but due to the steep terrain and the map being a long ridge there were not many different routes or loop options. We covered 93 km with 4700 m elevation gain, close to completing our plan to clear the course ( 100 km with 5000 ish m gain) Skipped 4 checkpoints just north and south of the finish, plus one earlier on right after clearing the course was beginning to look unreachable.

When I get a nice digital copy of the map or scan mine I'll post our route.

Thanks to Eric and MerGeo for a great weekend and fun experience.

@Guy—having a full-time job usually precludes one from having another full-time job. Or something like that. MerGeo does not have a lot of dedicated help; that's what I meant by resource-constrained. Having the two dedicated staff members tend to epunch, in addition to handling mapping, cartography, logistics of transporting several tons of cargo over tens of miles of unimproved forest roads, and food would have probably broken the operation.

I guess we should get RouteGadget going...

That would be awesome!

RouteGadget would be completely amazing. I would like to compare routes. We think we had a good route but looking at what others did is always informative and humbling.

It sounds to me like the cost of ownership/renting, as well as lack of person-power to operate the computer (no free labor for a "for profit" business), were, unfortunately, the main constraints. Then again this was NARC, not a Street Scramble.

An SI chip and splits are nice, but I'd rather have a precise map for rogaining any day. E-punching has only started to be used for these recently, partially due to the remote location of controls and difficulty in placing and retrieving them. And if things go wrong, it can take a heroic effort to finalize the results -- just ask T/D.

There were qualified people to "operate the computer" at the Three15er who were happy to help out (for "free"). The problem with epunch in a rogaine context is lead time and logistics. Orienteers often don't realize how vast a rogaine area is. A typical Middle-worthy O-map would only be enough for two or three rogaine checkpoints! It takes close to a person×week to visit all checkpoints and place the minimum equipment. So, rented epunch must be received at least a week+ before the event—but this leaves little margin. Suppose placement and vetting began well in advance, and would have ended in plenty of time to tend to other event tasks—but then you receive the rental epunch, and someone has to go out all over the 150+ km² just to hang the units! And then the anxious next recipient of the kit keeps bugging you, and the tired and worn out course setter has to go out for possibly third time in just over a week! talk about major endurance training.

And asking a small operation to be so well capitalized as to afford a €€€€ kit that is only used two or three times a year so that the few orienteers in attendance are happy is just so too much. Orienteers oh so often have expectations that would look entirely unreasonable in any other context or to the uninitiated (and expect a cut-rate price from those who work around the clock to satisfy these demands...)

T/D and others. I think that the only people who are complaining were not there. Those of us who were there, enjoyed it immensely.

Right on GHOSLO.
SI is a non-issue. The map was excellent, course challenging, and the controls in the right place. That is what matters.

RouteGadget is up. It's a ghetto setup on an old RG installation, but it should be adequate for uploading tracks and perhaps manually sketching your routes.

nice looking map!

Uploaded the path for our team:
Ledins and Nachev in Naches - the 24 hour division winning team

@T/D: Is there a way to export the path line that I drew in RG as a .gpx file format? I would like to add it to my log and QuickRoute.

Jagge reads AP and maybe the answer is yes, but I don't think so...

@T/D Do you know what the number of points limit of this version of RG? The tracks I tried to upload have ~38K points and I couldn't. I guess I can sparse them if it is a problem just not sure how much. Thanks!

No idea... this is an ancient RG. My route (for 1 hour) appears to have ~600 points saved in RG, which makes sense (every 6 seconds on smart sampling), while Nikolay's (manually drawn) has about 1000. I'd say you should get it down to at least <10k.