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Topic created by skolins on Tue Feb 23, 2016 at 10:57 pm
Below are the detailed course notes for the Governor Dick event on March 20th. Course notes will also be available at the event. Registration is on the porch of the environmental center, right next to the parking lot. The start and finish are both within 100 meters of the environmental center.
Governor Dick is on the schedule a bit earlier this year so that we can use the area west of Pinch road (which gets a bit green during the summer). This area is much flatter and less rocky than the eastern part of the park and contains a number of small streams, giving some very good terrain for the orange and brown courses as well as the first half of the other advanced courses. The second half of the green, red, and blue courses will use the big boulder area south of the environmental center - this is some nice, technically challenging terrain (good practice for West Point). Especially for Green, I did my best to limit the amount of time going over rocks rather than moving around them (depending on route choice of course). The white and yellow courses will use the trail network on the eastern side of the park with the yellow course containing some optional cut-throughs of the white, not-too rocky woods in this area.
Hope to see you there!
Important Course Notes for Orange, Brown, Green, Red, and Blue:
In order to avoid a road crossing on the clock there are two start boxes in the start triangle. For the intermediate and advanced courses (orange through blue) you should pick up your map, safely cross the road, punch the start box directly on the opposite side of the road, and then look at your map and go! You will have to re-cross Pinch Road later in the event - please do so safely.
The dark green areas west of Pinch Road are pretty dense and often thorny. Red Xs have been added in a few places to indicate trails on the map that have become overgrown or areas where vegetation has thickened significantly and is now dark green. Crossing symbols have been added in three places to indicate indistinct paths that allow you to cut through the dark green. One of these paths is off of Pinch Road and there are streamers indicating the location of the path on the Pinch Road side. The use of these crossings is not mandatory and good areas to cut through the dark green that are still accurately mapped are not designated by the crossing symbol.
The maps for this event are overprint maps, so there can be a small bit of drift resulting in the circles not being exactly centered on the features. In the upper left corner of the map there is a cross on the map and an overprinted cross - this allows you to see how much drift there is for your particular map in and what direction. This is not a big issue west of Pinch road, but east of Pinch road the terrain is very feature dense so a little drift can make it look like the circle is centered on a different feature.
Therefore, for the second half of the green, red, and blue courses, a red dot has been added in each circle on the map to unambiguously identify the control feature. An example is shown on a map available at registration. The last two controls of each course are fairly clear and thus not marked.
Less Important Course Notes and General Information about the Terrain:
Many of the courses cross themselves, often on a long leg and sometimes near a control, so please pay attention to the control numbers. Except as noted above, the vegetation mapping is still pretty accurate and rootstocks on the map are still clearly visible in the field. Since the map was made there are a fair number of new unmapped downed trees, drainage ditches, and sign-posts, including a new permanent orienteering course. The white and yellow courses will stay on or near the trails in the vicinity of the observation tower hill, with a few options for the yellow course to cut through the white woods in this area. The intermediate and advanced courses use two very distinct areas of the park:
State Game Lands (West of Pinch Road): Orange, Brown, and first half of Green, Red, and Blue
This part of the map is fairly flat or gently sloping with many small streams and water channels. There are only a few, relatively small boulders and not much stony ground. The vegetation is a bit thicker than other areas of the park with some areas of light to moderate green (generally easy to push through but enough to slow you down a bit). The green slash and dark green areas generally represent thorns. This time of year the thorns have died down significantly in most of the single slash areas but the darkest green and double green slash areas are often still tangles of thorns to be avoided. The double-green-slash clearing next to Pinch Road is particularly unpleasant.
The Rocky Southern Slope (East of Pinch Road): Second half of Green, Red, and Blue
This area is all on a fairly uniform slope with mostly subtle contour features, a few medium reentrants, and a stream at the bottom of the slope. There are numerous very large boulders, so the standards for what stony ground and boulders get mapped are very different than in the game lands. “Stony ground” can represent some very large, but generally not too tall, boulders (I don’t think there is any boulder west of the road that would make it onto the map east of the road except maybe as stony ground). The areas of many densely packed boulders and stony ground on the map are boulder fields that will certainly slow you down, but in other areas movement between the boulders is generally pretty easy and fairly fast. Dot knolls on the map are usually partially buried boulders and bare rock on the map is usually a large boulder with a relatively flat top. Medium green on the map in this area not thorny but is dense enough to slow you down a bit. There is private property south of the course which is marked as out of bounds on the map. There is also a firing range off the map south of the park, so you may hear some gunshots. However, there is a large power line cut between the park and the range, so even if you go out of bounds there shouldn’t be any risk of accidentally walking into the range.
Some of these trails in this area can be hard to see on the map due to the surrounding rocks, so a blank map with the trails highlighted will be provided at the registration area if you want to review the trail network before starting your course.
