Atlanta Outdoor Club - Event Archives

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Sat, Sep 4 2010 - Orienteering with Map & Compass by the Hooch + Free Picnic! (View Original Event Details)

Trip Leader(s):		Charlie Cottingham, Henrik Malmberg, Warren Rudert
Participants:		Charlie Cottingham, Dave, Dan A, Bill, Brad, Harry F, Sandra a.k.a (Hellraiser), Erum, Marlene, Sean H, Jeanette, Janet Wade, Al Z., Sharon H, Brian, papi, Warren Rudert, Henrik Malmberg, Hem, Sarah H, Pascale, Alan Seitman, Marie K, Arlene S, Sean Begley, craig, Diana, Barbara B, Oscar

Write Up:

Special thanks to Henrik Malmberg for providing the following nice thank-you note to the group including a recap of the fun we had at the O Day meet and what orienteering is all about. Henrik is a native of Sweden where orienteering is an immensely popular sport and pastime.
    –Charlie Cottingham, Sep 7, 2010

Hello fellow orienteers!

We would like to start by thanking everyone in our Atlanta Outdoor Club group for showing up last Saturday. We had great weather and the meet was packed even if it was Labor Day weekend with many Atlantans out of town. As planned, before going out on the course we met in the airy upstairs deck of the Jones Bridge "Education Center" and talked about the use of compasses & maps and the basics of the sport of Orienteering.

Thanks to the several of you who brought your own compasses and to you others for returning our "loaners" after the meet —great! We talked about how the compass needle always points toward magnetic north and how that helps us "orient" our map to be aligned with the surrounding terrain (since magnetic north is generally straight UP on O maps). As we all noticed, the O map is very detailed but by the end of the day I think we all got the general idea of what the symbols on our map represent vs. looking around at our surroundings in "reality." (We also learned that the special "clue sheet" for each O course uses symbols similar to those on the map—to tell us whether each "bag" is hung by a trail, stream, boulder, etc.) To know all the small details takes a lot of training and experience.

The sport of orienteering is basically to find the waypoints in the forest and return to the finish as fast as possible. I think that most of us can understand why this sport can get you hooked! The strategies & skill combined with good running abilities is what makes you good in orienteering. But as we saw on O Day, orienteering can still be enjoyable without going for a fast speed and without trying to find every bag. We had lots of fun just hiking together on a course (as "wayfarers") instead of running—this gave us the time along the way to make sure everyone got some coaching and practice in how to use their compass with their map—also the time to discuss various strategies for approaching each bag along the course.

We hope that you had a great day out with us, learned something, and that you might return for other GAOC meets to try the sport on your own. On O Day there were a couple of hundred people out at the same time—keep in mind that at most meets there are not nearly so many! (For upcoming O meets near Atlanta go to GAOrienteering.org and click on "Schedule."   A schedule of about 20 new meets for the new calendar year is posted each winter, and non-GAOC members are welcome to participate in all of them!)

—Writeup by AOC Co-Leader Henrik Malmberg

Wrap-up Comments and thanks from Charlie:

It was fun having such a nice big group of 29 AOCers take part in the GA Orienteering Club's big "National O Day" meet and hanging out with you afterward at the GAOC's free post-meet picnic!
We all owe a debt of gratitude to our GAOC friends who did such a fine job hosting us and about 300 others at this big annual free celebration of "O Day" at the CRNRA's lovely "Jones Bridge" unit by the Chattahoochee River.  GAOC volunteer Meet Director Jeff Lyberger did an excellent job pre-hanging the "bags" for the "Score-O," "White," and "Yellow" O courses and providing accurate pre-printed color maps and "clue sheets" for each course
Thanks to my friends, fellow AOCers Henrik Malmberg and Warren Rudert, both experienced orienteers—who did such a great job co-leading this event.  Henrik, Warren and I enjoyed taking AOC "wayfaring" teams out on the "Score-O" course, and I'm proud that each of our teams succeeded in finding all but a few of the 24 pre-hung Score-O "control bags" with time to spare afterward for enjoying the picnic!
  Thanks also to my friend Sarah Hampton, likewise an experienced AOCer and orienteer, who assisted with our "pre-meet tutorial" and took one of our novice AOC "wayfaring" groups out on the "White" Course after our tutorial session.
For those of you AOCers who shot photos at the O Day meet, we welcome any links you can provide to your online photo album, which we'll be glad to add to this post-trip writeup!

  -AOC event organizer and GA Orienteering Club veteran, Charlie Cottingham