Orienteering is back

Hi again,

After a long winter, Patty and I went to the Minnesota Orienteering Club's annual spring clinic and tune up at HylandPark in Bloomington yesterday. The weather was perfect - bright sun, blue sky, light wind and around 40 degrees. This is always the first event of the year and offers many different activities for all skill levels. As usual, it was very well-organized and right on time. MNOC knows how to run a meet.

We opted to do an independent untimed Score-O. In a regular meet, Score-O is a race, where you go get as many points as possible in a certain amount of time. The points are often close together and you can get them in any order. Obviously speed is critical. We didn't want close points and we're not very speedy. Since this was a practice session, we picked out a dozen points scattered all over the park and then went to brush up on our skills. Two hours later we had them all. We were tired and muddy, which is the way we like it.

There seems to be a friendly rivalry between geocachers and orienteers. Well, maybe rivalry isn't the word. I think orienteers hold geocachers in some disdain because of the GPS thing. Granted, navigating with dead reckoning, pace counts and terrain association is more difficult than following a GPS. However, good geocachers learn to read terrain and use it to their advantage. Orienteering develops that skill.

The real difference comes in what we're looking for. Orienteering points are large three dimensional orange and white triangles hanging in trees. Contrast that with looking for a camoflaged film canister. In fact, yesterday we found our geocaching skills very valuable in looking for the markers once we got close. Geocachers know how to scan and search.

So the two sports complement each other well. We enjoy them both very much. Our next meet is in two weeks, but we'll be geocaching and blogging before then.

More later.......Don aka Alpha6