Sunday was the second day I spent doing map refreshes at Bond Park. As Vladimir described in several posts, the map is very outdated. I found lots of features missing from the map, and some mapped features that no longer exist. A lot of construction took place too, major trails are now paved, new buildings were erected etc.

Today I checked if what I recorded last week was accurate (and it was), and then handled the rest area North of the dam, around the rope course and South of the parking lot at the community center (or maybe Senior center, now that I think about it).

I am still learning, both how to go on the field and record features and how to use the CAD program for drawing the map. But it is a lot of fun.

This is too good of a story not to share.

Saturday, December 29, 2008, I was in Umstead Park with my daughter, setting up flags for the next orienteering event (January 4th, 2009).

Continue reading →

Backwoods Orienteering Klub is selling full-size Umstead Park maps. This is the same map we are using for our orienteering events, except that ours are generally scale 1:10,000 printed on a letter-size paper, whereas this is 1:15,000 printed on a much larger sheet (events are usually happening in about a quarter of the mapped area).

The park-maintained trails are marked with red on top of the standard orienteering black.

The level of details is amazing (what you expect from orienteering maps). There is history behind the map too, apparently after one of the major hurricanes (Fran, 1997) the map was redone and somewhere close to 15,000 trees were _individually_ mapped. Also, at some point you could see the trail of a tornado taking down a huge number of trees (1989) – now only impassible areas of overgrown vegetation.

To quote from the map description:

… Utilizing orthophoto base materials, detailed field surveys were performed in various stages by eleven different individuals over twenty-six yers. It took an estimated one thousand one hundred man hours of labor to produce this map. Drafting was done on computer using OCAD software. This map is printed, using soy based inks, on PaperTyger, a paper plastic laminate, making it water and tear resistant.

If you are interested in one, check out one of the retailers, or let me know and I can try to pick one up for you when I get mine.

It’s been a busy orienteering season this year, with additional “training” events for members only, that made the schedule more interesting.

The June 8 event was fun, even though the heat added to the challenge of overgrown vegetation. I could have done better, since I lost a lot of time on several controls (and the worst one was the last). But exhaustion does play tricks to your mind. Vladimir Stemkovski described his experience on the Brown course, and he has posted the map. I believe that, when trying to hit control 12, I got to the trail (dotted black line) between 11 and 12, right where I was supposed to be, but missed the saddle, then got back on the trail and thought I was on the top of the hill, so my compass bearing dropped me on the paved road instead. Approaching the control from the paved road was easier, the large re-entrant helped me get in the right spot, and even then I had troubles seeing the saddle.

I was 20 minutes late past the 3PM course closing time, but I wasn’t the last one on the course (as I found out later, one orienteer suffered from heat exhaustion). I was pretty happy with the fact that I was able to run large portions of the course, but when I got to finish I probably looked like I stepped out of the pool (although I suspect there was some mud involved too). Long pants are mandatory to protect from bugs and branches, and that doesn’t help much for cooling you down, even though the tech fabric is definitely light and breathable.

In other news, I started working on a PalmOS application to download data from SportIdent  control stations. I didn’t have any time to work on it over the past months, but hopefully I’ll make some progress in a few weeks, when my schedule clears up a bit.

It’s been a few busy weekends. Sunday Feb 10th we had an orienteering event at Raven Rock, and Feb 17th was Birkhead Wilderness. Both are awesome parks.

The part of Raven Rock where most of the event happened had a lot of underbrush that made it near-impossible to run – but otherwise the course was very well chosen, with some awesome terrain features. The forest is South of Cape Fear, and the cliffs close to the river are very impressive.

Birkhead was a brand new course for Backwoods Orienteering, a bit far (close to the NC Zoo in Asheboro), but still a lot of fun. The forest is sprinkled with huge boulders, and controls were placed in a variety of features that made it less monotone than usual (where reentrants are the norm).

The orienteering club I am a member of has made the decision to purchase electronic punching equipment. Since I grew up with the classic punching equipment that has probably not changed in the last 40 years, this is pretty exciting.

I was kind of puzzled originally that an e-punch card could cost  about $35, while being able to store information about you and up to 33 punches. Assuming a generous 100 bytes per punch, that can’t be more than 4k of storage. 1G USB keys can be bought for a bit over $10 (sometimes even less). I guess there is a lot of research and development invested in making the solution resilient to the elements (the control stations are waterproof and smart enough to save their batteries etc), and there is not a high demand in orienteering equipment either, but I still think there’s a pretty high margin in selling the e-punch cards at $30+.

People are already unhappy that the new cards only work in new control stations  and that forces clubs to ditch their older equipment. There may well be valid reasons to force the incompatibility (after all, the newer e-punch cards are more than twice as fast as the old ones, and it may be that the old stations just can’t handle that).

Since I’m not traveling to A-meets, it doesn’t bother me that I will have a new e-punch card. But it does point out one fact: the good old stapler-like puncher lasted for the past half a century and is still a valid option – can you say the same thing about electronic equipment? I am worried we’ll see the same trend as with modern computers: update every 3 years or you won’t find software to run.