Lake Accotink
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PDF versionShareThisSeptember 23
Sunday
Lake Accotink – Run, Bike or Walk, but please no Swimming
NOTE: The MTBO portion of the event has been CANCELLED due to rain. Foot orienteering will continue as planned.
On September 23rd 1806, Lewis and Clark returned to St. Louis after two years of exploring the Pacific Northwest. Now exactly 212 years later, channel your inner explorer in the wilderness of Northern Virginia!
Please join us for this season's Lake Accotink orienteering meet which will have several exploration/racing opportunities:
Lake Accotink is a beautiful park in Springfield, VA with a train trestle, tangled trails and of course a sparkling lake. Don’t miss this second orienteering meet of the fall.
Lewis and Clark were tasked to explore and map newly acquired territory and were out for two years, four months and ten days, your task is to use your map skill, have fun, and be back by 3pm.
For any youth or large groups planning to attend this event, please contact the event director so that we can coordinate pre-registration for the group. The group registration and waiver forms are part of the information on our Group Leaders page.
Note that registration for both events will be at the McLaren-Sargent Pavilion, accessed from the parking lot off Heming Ave rather than through the southern park entrance most navigation apps will lead you to if you search for Lake Accotink Park.
Mountain Biking Notes:
MTBO is navigational racing on mountain bikes, in which each participant is given a map showing a series of checkpoints to be found in a designated order in the shortest possible time, with the choice of route between checkpoints left up to the racer. Success therefore depends on raw speed, of course, but also on the ability to read the map, make good route choices and execute them efficiently.
Rules for the MTBO event:
NOTE: The railway bed/track is out of bounds. Stay away from it.
Note: in case of rain and therefore poor trail conditions we may be required to cancel the MTBO event; make sure to check this website the day before the event for news. The foot-O in the afternoon will take place rain or shine.
| Location | Lake Accotink Park, McLaren-Sargent Pavilion, Springfield, VA (Classic) | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Registration | No advance registration required. Just show up and have fun! | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Start Times | Start on a foot orienteering course any time between 11am - 1:30pm. [MTBO starts have been cancelled.] | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Schedule | Sunday, September 23
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| Location Details |
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| Course Details | Classic
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| Course Notes | Classic Our second full spectrum event of the season will in fact be, weather permitting, more than full spectrum, offering mountain bike orienteering in the morning before the usual pedestrian orienteering. MTBO courses will be available in short, medium, and long versions. There will be classic point-to-point white, yellow, and orange courses and, for advanced (and adventurous intermediate) orienteers, another Canadian import to follow on last season's dogbones score-O - a Thomass event. The start for all courses, including MTBO and THOMASS, will be in the grassy area below the Lake Accotink dam, a few hundred meters walk west of parking and registration for the event. The finish for all courses will be at the west end of the dam, just off the main trail heading west from the start. A Thomass is a form of handicapped score-O, traditionally mass started, bearing some resemblance to the familiar Stumble/Bumble formats. It features a single score-O window, in which everyone has their own handicap based on age/gender/experience entitling them to skip a certain number of controls. After the score-O window, it's a straightforward race to the finish with low handicap speedsters gunning to see how many of the people with higher handicaps they can overhaul and canny high handicappers doing their best to hold on to whatever advantage they built up in the score-O window. For this event, a mass start will be offered at noon. The course will also be available throughout the classic start window, for those to whom the timing or nature of the mass start isn't congenial. Please, if taking part in the mass start, gather at the start by 11:50am for map distribution and a pre-race briefing. Participants will be allowed to turn over their maps and plan how to attack the course for a minute prior to the mass start. People starting the Thomass on their own are asked to give themselves no more time than that to study the map prior to starting, in the interest of fairness. The handicapping system will work as follows: All Thomass participants should add all that up and come up with a number of controls they're allowed to skip between 3 and 11. For convenience during registration, the various possible levels of handicap will correspond to our usual assortment of course colours as follows: All course maps will be printed at 1:7,500 scale. The contour interval is 5 meters. Note for all courses: the map is now, ignoring some updating of the trail network over the years, the most elderly QOC map in regular use and its age shows. Unmapped newer rootstocks probably outnumber the mapped ones. Some vanished trails have been removed from the map for this event but not necessarily all that ideally should have been. There are also a few new trails or rerouted sections of mapped trails not reflected on the map. The vegetation mapping is also not to be absolutely relied on - this will be most noticeable in a fairly consistent failure when it comes to indicating what on much newer maps would be the difference between open woods (white) and slow running (light green). Control 114 in particular, on the yellow, orange, and Thomass courses, is in the middle of a patch of unmapped light green, verging on thick enough in places to rate medium green (Update: in fact, a large tree has fallen into the center of the reentrant in the few weeks since control locations were vetted. The control is now hung a little higher in the reentrant than planned/indicated on the map, immediately to the WSW of the fallen tree.). Darker shades of green, where mapped, tend to still more or less correspond to reality and should generally be avoided, as should marshes. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Entry Fees | Individual Entries
Note: juniors = under 21
Team or Group Entries Participants are welcome to compete together as a single team entry. Teams containing one or more nonmembers are charged the nonmember individual rate. Teams containing one or more adults are charged the adult individual rate. For teams to receive member or junior rates, all members of the team must be members or juniors, respectively. Each extra team map beyond the first is an additional $2. Individuals or teams desiring to compete on a second course can do so for a reduced fee of $2/map. Important Notes
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