Prince William Forest Park

The night orienteering courses on offer Saturday evening are beginner, intermediate and advanced (short, medium, and long), as laid out above. The beginner course stays mostly on trails and in open areas within the immediate vicinity of cabin camps 2 and 5 and offers controls that would be suited for a white course or the easier end of the range of difficulty appropriate to a yellow course in daylight - they will no doubt seem slightly harder in the dark. The intermediate and advanced courses take place almost entirely in the mostly trackless woods east of cabin camp 5, between the south fork of Quantico Creek and Route 619. This is an area dominated by large, fairly steep spurs and reentrants with mostly white and light green woods - fortunately the map, including the mapped vegetation, is aging well. In the dark, it should offer very challenging navigation - trying a longer or harder course than you're accustomed to is not advised. The intermediate course is similar to a typical orange course, although in darkness it should provide sufficient challenge for anyone who would normally run brown and wants a course under 4km. The advanced courses are advanced - nothing out of the ordinary for an event in typical QOC terrain but it will be very easy to make parallel errors in the dark and not so easy to recover from them. Please choose your course accordingly. And make sure you have fresh or freshly recharged batteries for your light.

Should you get seriously lost on the intermediate or any of the advanced courses, heading west will eventually get you back either to cabin camp 5 or to Route 619 east of cabin camp 5. If knowing which way is west is a problem (lost compass or failing light) and another orienteer doesn't come along to help you out, heading generally uphill should eventually take you to Route 619 or heading downhill should get you to the south fork, either of which can be followed back to cabin camp 5.

On Sunday we'll revisit some of QOC's most challenging mapped terrain, site of day 1 of the 2007 US Classic Championships. Be warned, this terrain gave many US elites a hard time when they first encountered it. It's still our usual spur and reentrant terrain, with varied vegetation and the map aging well since 2007 (except in one small area regrowing after a forest fire), but it's generally slightly thicker, significantly less steep and with more subtle contour detail than the night-O terrain. The courses, other than white and yellow, run a little longer than usual and emphasize route choice - there's just so much lovely terrain in the west half of Prince William Forest Park that the temptation to design courses that visit as much of it as possible is hard to resist. Apologies therefore to those who liked the recent beige course at Little Bennett that there won't be a shorter than brown advanced course on offer at this event.

One note of particular importance given the expected frigid temperatures - the orange, green, red and blue courses all face a crossing of the south fork of Quantico Creek fairly early on in their courses and the legs they'll be doing are such as to make it tempting to very tempting to try to ford the creek rather than go out of the way to the nearest bridge. The map does, as far as I've seen, do a reasonable job of indicating where the creek is relatively easy to cross and where doing so involves wading rather than just a step or two in the water or some careful negotiation of stepping stones, but my experience has been you'll probably get at least one foot wet getting across. Please consider the water-resistant and insulating qualities of your shoes and socks, your personal tolerance for cold, wet feet and how much you really care about saving a few minutes of running when making these route choices. You've been warned so sympathy for those unhappy with their choice, whatever it may be, will be limited.

White and yellow courses will start and finish next to the dining hall in which we'll have registration and results. Orange and advanced courses will start there but have a remote finish and approximate 600 meters to walk back to the dining hall in order to download.

Jon Torrance, Course Designer