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Topic created by skolins on Wed Mar 21, 2018 at 4:07 pm
Below are the full course notes for the Gov Dick event, including a description of the special zoomed-in map section.
Note that the event is occuring on SATURDAY March 31 to avoid conflicting with Easter.
Hopefully some warmer temperatures and strong March sun will melt most of our snow before then.
Hope to see you there!
Registration is on the porch of the environmental center, right next to the parking lot. The start is about a 300 meter walk from registration, with 15m of climb. Water will be provided at the start location (in addition to the usual water on the course). Finish is at the registration area.
Very Important - 1:2500 Insert for Orange and Advanced Courses:
One of the challenges with setting courses at Governor Dick is that the area near the environmental center is a bit green, leading to some trail run legs coming into the finish. In order to change things up a bit this year, instead of just a trail run, the intermediate and advanced courses will have a downhill section containing a number of quick legs on controls all within 30m of the trail. However, the controls will be on the backside of large rock features and thus not be visible from the direction of approach on the trail (or in some cases from the trail at all). The challenge will be keeping map contact and leaving the trail at the correct time.
This section of the map has a lot of rock detail. In order to see this section of controls clearly, in your map bag (on the back side of the main, 1:10,000 scale map) you will have a special 1:2500 scale insert of just this part of the course. I used control numbers in the 70s to indicate the controls that are on the insert map. For Orange, Brown, and Green, the insert section goes all the way to the finish. For Red and Blue, after the insert section (which ends at control 76) there is another section on the southern part of the main map before the finish (the go control and finish will still appear on the insert, to be visited after the southern controls). The clue sheet for the entire course will be re-printed on the insert. All controls that are on the insert will also be on the main map but may be hard to see. Note that different courses use different controls during the insert section, so check your codes and don't blindly follow other orienteers!
Other Important Course Notes
On the map, very large boulders with fairly steep sides and a flatter top are often indicated using the bare rock symbol with the cliff symbol used to indicate steep sides of the boulder. For controls hung on such boulders I have used both the bare rock and the cliff symbols in the clue sheet. So while there may be multiple cliffs in the circle, the combination of cliff bordering bare rock will uniquely identify the control feature. Pay attention to the side of the side of the feature indicated in the clues - some of the rock feature are really big!
All roads and trails along the edges of the map are in-bounds, including the road and trails in Mt. Gretna heights (in the northwest corner of the map). However, there are a number of houses on the edges of the map. Please respect these homeowners by not running through their yards. In a few places where the course comes close to houses the private property has specifically been marked as out of bounds on the map.
General Course Notes About the Map:
The courses will spend most of the time in the northern section of the park. This area is composed mainly of hillsides with only a few large terrain features, but many smaller terrain features and lots of platforms, rocks and other point features. There is a lot of white woods with good visibility this time of year though the travel is slowed in spots by patches of vegetation and moderately rocky ground underfoot. The vegetation mapping is still pretty accurate and rootstocks on the map are a bit weathered but still clearly visible in the field (though there are also a fair number of new, unmapped downed trees). The trails on the maps are pretty clearly visible and blazed. A few trails around Pinch road have changed slightly, one overgrown trail is crossed out on the map, and a couple of small trails have been added in black overprint.
As part the park’s forest management plan, there are a couple areas that you may run into where trees have been cut since the map was made. Areas where trees have been cut but that remain passable (but slow) are outlined in purple. A new area that has been fenced in is indicated by an overprinted black vertical-slash fenced area symbol on the maps.
The southern, rocky part of the map will contain the 1:2500 insert section of the the courses and the second part of the red and blue courses. 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. 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.
