Pohick Bay

Pohick Bay is a fun place to orienteer and to also do other activities like boating and frisbee golf. For orienteering, the "white woods" are fast, and the map is great and easy to navigate while on the run. At this time of year, there may be some flies and ticks, however, and a few small poison ivy patches may exist.

Course notes
All maps: contour interval is 5m, and distance between N/S lines should be 300m.
Course map scale is 1:7500 for white, yellow, orange and brown, and 1:10,000 for all others. There is a map change for red and blue courses (and there's a small chance the green course map will be 1:7500).
Please watch for cars when crossing the road: between registration & the restrooms/start, approaching the finish, & during the course for long advanced courses.
If you are thinking about moving up a course, take a look at the map first.
The constrained nature of the map led me to knowingly violate some common course setter principles, so don't be surprised if you encounter dog legs, steepness, a leg without much route choice or a clue description not matching the mapped feature.
White course: will make turns not at controls; expect to step off the trails. Yellow course: expect handrails that are not trails. Both white and yellow: expect to get your feet wet.

Map Notes:
Out of Bounds: There are two types of out of bounds marked on the map: A magenta hatch and a “puke” green. Please do not go into either, or the trails just inside the golf course. In addition, please go around any occupied campsites. The start is in the middle of the overflow campground but most logical routes start along a trail. For some courses the run to the finish will go back thru the campsites.
Water - Blue: Everything is wetter than mapped.
Vegetation- Green: darkest green is usually truly green. Lighter shades are pretty easy to dodge around. Green stripe (slow, but good visibility) is often downed trees. Jon Torrance’s 2018 vegetation mapping is very good. Yellow: is used when the sky is open. Some yellow power lines now have shrubbery. Affects Yellow course. White forest can be wild forest or scattered trees like in the campground area near the start.
Ground cover in the forest: may be leaves or that invasive woodland grass that hides your feet.
Trails: A section of a long trail is missing from the map. I will try to mark this on the maps as a straight dashed line after printing. Could affect Orange thru Blue. Some trails now have different status then mapped. Trails are muddy.
Manmade activity: There is some forest cutting along a major trail. This had created larger clearings/ wider tracks. Please do not play on the construction machinery. Could affect Yellow thru Blue.
Point Features: Rootstocks are at least 1 meter high. Boulders can be <1 foot. Not all 1 foot boulders are mapped.
Pits/cup depressions and dot knolls: one or the other or none are mapped. Ruins may have unmapped well holes nearby. Trash piles are mapped as black X’s.
Gulleys (ravines), ditches, and streams: Gulleys will probably have streams. Streams may be in gulleys. Gulleys are difficult to cross. Take note of which side of a gulley, stream or ditch is listed in the control description. Ditches may be deep or shallow, wet or dry and may have a foot of leaves.
Contours – the abundance of supplemental (dashed) contours ( ½ the regular contour interval) give the impression of steeper terrain.