Orienteering is fun; or 9/10/11 at Patuckaway

[Jason Berard]

A friend asked the kids and I if we wanted to go orienteering a while back, and we said "sure, sounds fun!". We didn't really know what we were signing up for, but any chance to get into the woods has got to be a fun time, so what the heck, right!?
So yesterday morning, we were off the Pawtuckaway State park to an O-meet put on by Up North Orienteering, which is an orienteering club based in NH.

We got there, were welcomed by friendly folks at every turn, and got our maps, punch cards, and clue sheets.

My friend Kevin knew what he was doing and was an excellent guide for the day.

Here, we are copying the "yellow" course map.

There are many different levels of course difficulty. Yellow courses are mainly along trails, with the controls near or on the trails. We did a yellow first, and then an orange course. The orange course was twice as long (4 kilometers), and all the controls are in the woods, not along trails. They are however located near some sort of obvious feature in the landscape, like a large boulder, or stone wall, etc.

And we're off!

Here we are at a control, punching our cards.

When we got home, Licia asked the kids if they had a good time, and they all exclaimed in unison, "Yeah! we got to race through the woods!"

I think I may have just found a new hobby to occupy my spare time.

This was a great event at Pawtuckaway, and all levels of orienteers are welcome. They even have a night event called "Vampire-O" which is like flashlight tag as far as I can tell. Also, canoe-O for folks who want to paddle, and string-O for little kids(you basically follow the flagging to the controls, and get stickers! The shorter courses are between 1-2 kilometers, and the longer ones I believe are 7k.We did our 4 k course in 1 1/2 hours, which put up in about 5th place. The fastest time was about 1 hr.

If you'd like to learn more about orienteering you can go here:http://www.upnoor.org/

Anyway, we'll be back next year, hopefully to stay for the whole weekend! I'm also going to look in to other events between now and then! Thanks, Kevin for inviting us along!

 

[J.Dub]

Yeah, O-ing is a great way to get the family out in the woods without the level of commitment of say...a three-day backpacking trip in the ADKs.

I started taking my kids O-ing when Katie was 10 and Adam was 8. Their responsibilites were based on their ages at the time: Katie was navigator (improving her abilities to read a topo map with each outing) and Adam was the CP puncher. Now that our club has gone to electronic punches, he gets to wear the chip on his finger and pop it in the reader at all the CP's. They *loved* it, and were always asking when the next O-meet was.

Unfortunately, we haven't gone orienteering AT ALL for the last two seasons -- as the kids have gotten older, their own weekend activites (sports, play rehearsals, trips to the mall, etc.) have taken up more space on the calendar and often conflict with O-meets. My daughter has expressed an interest in going trailrunning with me, so I'm hopeful I can use that as way to get her back on some orange courses.