UNO local meet at Nottingcook Forest, site of an
A meet last fall and the Billygoat next spring. Last fall lots of people had not so clean runs -- the forest is not so easy for orienteering, a combination of a reasonably complicated topography and varied vegetation. It's not really thick, it's not really nasty, it just isn't all that fast and the visibility isn't all that good. And it keeps changing, little bits quite open, little bits thick, always changing. So there's a continual conflict between wanting to run a straight line and wanting to find the best running. And the result is that it is easy to make mistakes.
I had a decent run, one bad control, a couple of minutes, and maybe another minute total on a couple of others. Wasn't moving great, legs a little less than fresh, but still would have taken a clean run to be 10 minutes per km. Which was about what I was doing last fall. As I said, not a fast forest.
My
routes and a few comments --
Note: Master maps and pin punching today, but an interesting forest (i.e. if you can't have everything, a good forest easily beats high tech).
3. Too far left leaving 2, and then couldn't convince myself to go look where the control was until I'd spent quite a while circling a very small area. 3:20 for a leg less than 100 meters. :-(
8. The "crossable" marsh looked totally unappealing (deep water, green slime...).
9. Past the edge of the knoll, southwest, after a bit saw the control way back to my right. There was no clear end of the marsh. I actually stopped for a moment after I punched to check the bearing back to the knoll and it was due east. So something was a little fishy, but no big deal.
10. Quite thick in the last 100 meters, also lots of rock, all sorts of boulders almost big enough to be mapped. Getting confused, saw the cliff, found it on the map and was ok. Lost maybe 45 seconds.
11. Caught up to a guy in a red hat, punched together, never saw him again.
12. Moving much better, visions of a guy in a red hat beating me to the control.
14. Trouble reading the map as I started down the last steep hill. I remember thinking, just go down a couple lines from the bottom and figure it out. Got lucky, spotted the control right ahead of me when I couldn't have said exactly where I was.
15. Little teeny knoll just before the last up told me right where I was.
16. Moving really good, passed Hans Bengtsson, patron saint of NEOC, sort of knew where I was all the time, back in control at the end and spiked it. And then in.
Thanks to Bob Lux and the UNO folks for a nice day in the woods.