Wheaton

White and Yellow maps will be printed at a scale of 1:7,500; all other maps will be 1:10,000. Nadim Ahmed has recently done a significant though by no means a full, park-wide update of our map and I also made a few updates in the vicinity of control locations so the map is in fairly good shape - there almost certainly are a few new and unmapped rootstocks out there but I'm confident only a few. For the vegetation mapping overall, don't expect perfection in every detail and you won't be disappointed but the vegetation mapping does a fairly good job conveying the relative runability of different parts of the map so regulars at Wheaton with good memories should be only slightly advantaged. To minimize that advantage, the rest of you should, while considering route choices, keep in mind that while there are some very nice white woods, particularly on the large hill in the eastern third of the park, most of the white woods flirt with the boundary between white and light green while most of the areas mapped as light green permit running speeds in the lower part of the light green range, sometimes flirting with the high end of the medium green range. That longer route on trails may be a little bit better compared to more direct routes than it looks at first glance. Gaiters and other appropriate protective clothing are nonetheless advisable - sometimes (the trick will be in deciding when) the fastest thing to do will be to brave the thicker vegetation.

It shouldn't be an issue on the white and yellow courses but Wheaton isn't a large park and many controls are close together, though all are compliant with OUSA rules on minimum allowable distances between controls. Orange and advanced runners, check your codes. White and yellow runners check them too - it's a good habit to develop.

The size of the park also dictates that the advanced courses, to an increasing degree as the course distances increase, present opportunities for confusion as to which control on the map is the next, as legs cross previous legs and pass very near other controls earlier or later in the course. I've made every effort, changing and even adding some legs and bending a few lines between controls slightly to avoid lines between controls passing through other controls and make it as unambiguous as possible what the sequence of the controls is but a little bit more attention than usual to make sure you don't waste time navigating to the wrong control may be attention well-invested.

Some advanced courses (it would be telling to say which ones) have a control hung on a rootstock from which all the earth has dropped away leaving only the wooden part of the original rootstock. Fortunately, the control bag itself should be visible enough once you get close to mitigate negative effects that might otherwise result from this deviation from typical rootstock appearance.

That all said, I think I've designed an interesting set of courses. I anticipate hearing some lively discussions among even Wheaton veterans of which was the best way to get from point A to point B for a fairly large number of distinct pairings of A and B.

Jon Torrance, Course Setter