Orienteering 1:20:00 [2]
On MOA's Spirit Sands map in Spruce Woods Provincial Park, Manitoba. Quite technical sandy glacial terrain. 2.5 meter contour interval and the map is positively speckled with shallow depressions, many of them extremely subtle. 1988 map so I'm pretty sure some of my difficulties related to the need for a vegetation update - I spent a little while intensively going over one area to get into the map then some slow legs made up on the spot, still paying a lot of attention to collecting features along the way. The terrain was dominantly rough open with many small to medium patches of woods. I now proclaim rule one of moving through this terrain....
Stay out of the woods.
On top of boundaries of wooded areas shifting with new growth, the woods were almost entirely white on the map and almost entirely medium green and worse in the terrain.
Went back for a drink/power gel and to equip myself with a 2004 revision of part of the Yellow Quill map adjacent to Spirit Sands.
Orienteering 2:03:00 [2]
Back out into the terrain - a few kilometers north through Spirit Sands making up legs along the way, then across the road into Yellow Quill. Or, as the revision has it, Green and Yellow Quill. Similar terrain but with much more reliable vegetation mapping. Though someone has strange ideas about how to use white and yellow - the latter was not noticeably different to my eye from the rough open and a number of areas shown in white would, in my opinion, have been better represented by rough open with an overlay of the underbrush/deadfall symbol, i.e. there was nothing in them worth calling a tree. Still, the map/terrain combo was much less confusing but still challenging to read at anything like normal O speed. If they're offering terrain like that at the 2005 WCOC's, I'll go. Provided the map has been updated this millenium.