Little Bennett Day-O

Since the White course is the same as last night's Beginner course, those who did the Beginner/night course are encouraged to try the Yellow course today (Sunday).

The courses for this year’s Night-O and Day-O meets will be located in the portion of the park around the soon to be non-existent Nature Center. None of the courses will cross Little Bennett Creek or Rt. 121. So if you find yourself crossing a large stream or crossing a highway other than the park entrance road, take a good look at your map because you are in the process of getting lost. I have attempted to keep participants in the more open portions of the park, however, with the exception of the White/Beginner course, one will encounter some brief areas of increased vegetation. Route choice options will allow navigation through some of the nastier vegetation that Little Bennett has to offer, especially on some of the longer legs on the advanced courses. Even in the more open areas of the park, there may be some annoying ankle to knee high briar-like vegetation, so gaiters are recommended. For the night event, reflectors will be present on all control bags. Please be advised that in the past, the park has placed small dot reflectors on trees leading to assigned hunting locations in the park. Ignore these, the bag reflectors used in the Night-O are larger rectangular reflectors placed on the control bag itself.

Only the Beginner Night-O and White courses are essentially identical. It is recommended that if one runs the Beginner course in the Night-O, one should then try the Yellow course in the Day-O (it’s not that much more difficult). The Night-O Intermediate, Short and Long Advanced courses, while sharing some control locations, are different from their corresponding Day-O counterparts. Due to the relatively non-technical nature of the Park terrain, the Day-O event would be a good chance for those of you who usually run an Orange course to try a more advanced course. Control bags for the White, Yellow and Orange courses will be hung so that they are clearly visible from the logical approach of the participant. In most cases one will see the bag before they see the actual control itself. However, for the advanced courses, the control bags that are not shared by the Orange or intermediate courses will be hung in less obvious locations from the logical approach of the participant (read, behind stuff). In this case, one will have to first locate the control feature, then the control bag. Locations of the bag relative to the feature will not be on the clue sheet. The White-Beginner and Yellow courses are based on the Park’s trails. Please be aware that these trails can be muddy/icy in sections as well as rocky and eroded in sections (especially going downhill). Watch your footing.

The topography of Little Bennett Park is of a relatively non-technical nature, broad ridges with few land features and even fewer small rock features. Therefore, in order to make things a bit more interesting and to increase the number of potential control sites, a number of prominent root-stocks have been mapped and are used extensively as control features for this meet. All these root-stocks are at least 1 meter in height or width and still have dirt around their roots (hence the brown X symbol instead of the green X symbol). These have become de-facto temporary boulders. They are prominent enough that one can recognize them at running speed and are thus useful as control locations. A final bit of advice, since control bags are hung on similar features relatively close to each other, please pay close attention to the codes on those bags.

A note on vegetation mapping. The light green vegetation tends to be closely spaced saplings with good visibility, no trouble to navigate, but it might slow you down a bit. The medium green has reduced visibility and much more closely spaced vegetation of various kinds. The dark green is usually briars and should be avoided at all costs (even at this time of the year). Areas indicated by green parallel lines are areas of fallen trees, usually with good visibility, but will require a bit more effort to navigate.