Umstead Park, Raleigh, North Carolina
April 8, 2006

Umstead Park is a wonderful area for orienteering. The terrain is not too extreme (in most places), and the white woods is really nice. There are thousands of trees downed by Hurricane Fran, which means you get to bound over tree trunks, if you have the energy.

As I was fact-checking this, I found an announcement for the post-hurricane map update: "On September 4, 1996, Hurricane Fran crawled over Umstead Park and felled over 13,000 trees. This map shows 11,695 individual trees and their direction of fall as well as 416 areas too dense to map individual trees." (The quote says 1993, but Fran was actually in 1996.)  The map also shows whether or not the tree has a rootstock. I was running along, "collecting" the root stocks, and I was amazed when I passed a correctly-mapped tree with no rootstock. In a lot of places these felled-tree areas are just too complicated to use for precise navigation, but I found a lot of the less dense areas just spot-on accurate.

Sometimes rootstock are brown, sometimes green. I'm sure they picked green to match the symbol they made for the fallen trees.  Some people might complain that making a new symbol is frowned upon by the ISOM, but I see this as just an application of the green colors for vegetation area mapping (ISOM Symbols 406, 408, and 410).  In any event, individually mapping 11,695 trees is an amazing commitment to a good map.

This is the most difficult 2m course (RDF-wise) I've run outside of the world championships in Brno. It was difficult to determine the order, and it wasn't until late in the event that you knew if you got the order right. As a new M40, this was my first event to find 4 transmitters rather than all five. Unfortunately, transmitter 4 had issues for the early starts, and I was told to skip 4 as well as 2 (the M40 skip for this event), leaving me to find 3 transmitters: 1, 3, 5. (They probably should have switched the M40 skip to 4, so we could have found all but 4, but...whatever.)

Click here for my map. (Of course, the competition map doesn't show the locations of the five transmitters. This is a scan of the souvenir map, with the transmitters marked.)

From the start, you run down a corridor to the start triangle as transmitter 1 is on, and you have to decide what to do during the first 5 minutes, as the transmitters cycle on for 1 minute each. Since there is no transmitter within 750m of the start, the best thing to do is get 750m away from the start in some likely direction. The corridor pointed east, right into a nasty looking reentrant system (nasty because it would play havoc with the bouncy 2m signals, and would make it very difficult to find anything). As I ran down the corridor, it was clear 1 was to my left, and I took that as proof that I was supposed to go north rather than east. There was a convenient road to the north on a ridge that looked like a good place to take bearings for all five transmitters. Since transmitters have to be more than 400m from each other as well has from the finish, it helps to know where all of them are, so you can eliminate areas close to other transmitters.

As I was travelling north on the road, 1 and 2 were to the north, but 2 was weak. When 3 came on, it was clearly in the line of the extended start corridor, but it wasn't strong enough to make me change my plan to go north.  Looking at my route, I might have shortened my route by over 1km if I'd gone for 3 first.  On the other hand, I still think 1 was a decent first transmitter because I got a lot of information about the order. Transmitter 4 was weak and north or northeast, and not a bearing I'd draw---the signal was just too broad---clearly not reliable. 5 was east, and stronger than 2 and 4.

After a few cycles going north, 1 was strong and directly east. I got it first, then decided 3 had to be next, since I didn't have to go north to get 2. (As it turned out, 2 wasn't north, so it was good I didn't need it.)

I was overly worried about the climb, probably due to the 3m contours looking so steep, but it was usually quite nice. Part of the map was very steep, and I somehow managed to avoid that. Anyway, my worry translated into underrunning 3 several times. I should have kept moving the whole four minutes, rather than stopping and waiting after a few.

After 3, I only needed 5, and I suspected based on the sound that it was just on the other side of the finish circle. Since that is one of the steepest areas on the map, and not a place to be running around in, I decided to go north to a ridge trail to go east rather than pass through the finish zone and go up-down-up-down repeatedly. As I got to the ridge trail and headed east (actually kind of ESE), I did stop twice to check for 5. I was trying to pick the correct spur/reentrant to go down so I could minimize climb. The first time I stopped (south of the trail on a high spot), the signal was less than it was on the trail, which really surprised me, so I checked the other side of the ridge line (north of the trail, again on a ridge), and it was clearly more east along the trail. I decided to keep moving east along the trail until I either got a bearing off to the side, or I overran it.

It turns out 5, which was pretty strong near the start at the far west of the map, was almost completely off the east side of the map, about 3.5km away from the start. It wasn't particularly interesting getting there (mostly a walk/run on the trail), but it was interesting radio work.

Interestingly, the ridge trail I mentioned was filled with people doing a 36-hour-limit 100-mile run. I was running by them thinking, "Man, these people are nuts.", and I'm sure they were thinking the same thing about us, as we popped out of the woods, ran by with our radio antennas and maps and O' clothes, then disappeared back into the woods.

At 5, I was hoping there was a shorter, technical way back to the finish that would be much shorter than the trail. I looked at the leg for about 30 seconds before deciding the trail was the only quick way back.

Again, it wasn't interesting orienteering, but it was an interesting course. Certainly one of the hardest I've seen (in my 3 years of doing this). I need to be a little more aggressive on 2m: I underran transmitter 3 several times. I probably lost 10-15 minutes at least by stopping and waiting in "good" locations.  I lost at least a cycle halfway to 5, but that was probably time well spent.  It was really confusing there.  I'm a little bummed that I didn't get to hunt 2 and 4.  They look like very challenging placements.

I didn't see a tick the whole weekend, but I was *really, really* well protected. I got Lyme Disease here last July, when I saw hundreds of ticks, and had a tactical mistake in my DEET and Permethrin protection.

There was a severe storm watch that never materialized, although we did get a few drops of rain.

My run (actually run/walk) got me first in M40, which I attribute to just making fewer errors than the others (Gyuri excepted). It didn't feel like a winning performance---I was off-balance the whole time. I did keep pushing, though. Having a lot of practice on 2m AM "keyed carrier" transmitters certainly helped.