Umstead Park
Camp Whispering Pines
October 9, 2005

It sure started out as a rainy threatening day, but while it never cleared up, it never rained either.  It was nice to be cool for a change.  The courses were difficult, and the times were longer than usual, however we had a good percentage of finishers except on orange.  Congratulations to the yellow & orange course participants. Those courses were at the top of their rated difficulty. The orange course was especially hard.  Even the brown, green, and red courses challenged the orienteers. 

Parallel Errors due to Unexpected Bridge on Orange through Red courses.

Quite a few people had to deal with this problem.  It was leg 2 on Orange, 3 on Brown and 4 on Green and Red.

First of all the map was field checked in 1997 with only minor updates since then.  In any case, the "new" bridge was not on the map.  It made sense for this bridge to be there because we all cut through at that spot anyway.  But in the old days the trail went to the boulders in the stream.  That black dot in the middle of the stream on your map was not a bridge.  A minor bridge on a trail is clearly marked by having one of the dashes of the trail cross the creek.  If it is a major bridge, then it would get the bridge symbol like the bridge on the west edge of the picture.  In this case it was just a dot inside the blue.

In any case, many of you followed the trail to the creek and then a little sooner than you expected,  (your first clue that things were taking a turn for the worse) crossed the creek, and thought you were at a bridge that was actually the boulder on the map.  Of course you then went south along the trail to the re-entrant, which you found in about the right spot except it wasn't as big as you expected!  Climbing the re-entrant it seemed a bit steep, but you were having little problems with the map anyway... oh good, there is a ditch -- except no flag.

So for those of you who can relate to this story here is an exploded diagram of the problem.

Thanks to the many helpers:

• Design the courses & teach the class  --  Joseph Huberman 
• Field check the courses and set the advanced controls  --  Nadia & Charles Scharlau 
• Set Sunday Morning Trail Controls  --  Mark Mickunas & Miles deForest
• Registration/Start  from 11:30 - 1:30 --  Lisa Hollaran & Julie and Dave Randolph
• Registration/Finish from 1:30 - 3:30  --  Gordon Pitz & Ron Brown & Ruth Bromer
• Pick up controls --  Gordon Pitz, Will Corkey, Artem Kazentsev, & Eugueni Kountikov

Please let me know if you need a correction for your listing.