Discussion: Orienteering without infrastructure

I want to ask a hypothetical question.

Say I'm a novice orienteer. (Not expert, but I can do an orange course pretty well, and I'm hit or miss on advanced courses). Now assume I just moved to a state with no orienteering club, and I'd like to keep orienteering. What's more, I'd like to do it with friends.

Say I'm a college student. So I've got plenty of friends who like outdoor stuff, but I don't have a travel budget, and I don't much cash at all.

How do I do it?

Back to basics: get any kind of map (USGS, Google, Highway, Park service, etc), check and edit it for reasonableness, design a course, hang controls. Markers can be as simple as empty Coke cans with colored crayons or unique codes attached.

Infrastructure isn't important; it is the course design, the individual legs, and the running that make an O meet fun.

At O-Ringen in Sweden, I saw an exhibit of early orienteering (1920's). Maps were hand-drawn on plain paper; control features were various mountain tops; control markers were 3' on a side; and it took all day to complete a course.

Well you could get a map of your college campus, put out some unobtrusive markers such as old margarine or yoghurt containers, marked with suitable codes, mark their locations on the map, then hold a small competition for the outdoor club, the IFC, ROTC or the like, charge a nice entry fee and presto you'll have enough money to start an orienteering club. An area doesn't have to be very complex for the orienteering to be interesting for the newcomer.
Search out the nearby regional and state parks, get a topographic map put out some markers and hold a meet. Presto, you'll have enough money for you to travel to out of town meets.
Advertise your meet to the nearest O clubs. Some keeners will show up. Orienteers will travel great distances for the pleasure of running in a new area. Better still: attract the rogaine and AR crowd. They don't seem to care how rudimentary (bad) the map might be or if controls are in the right location.

Find a single partner - then at least you get to "do" half the stuff as you trade off;-)

The suggestion to make a campus map is good. OCAD version 6 is available for free on the OCAD website. Even easier, you could just use the campus or adjacent street map. I wouldn't hang O' markers but plastic flagging works or even sidewalk chalk; just make sure everyone knows what they are looking for. I know this is heavily weighted toward sprints but Sprints make up almost 30% of the WOC races.

Gord, I'm pretty sure your comments about the AR/Rogaine crowd are out to lunch.

No map is perfect, there are just degrees of detail and accuracy. Use pre-existing maps and set controls within their limitations. Campus has been suggested, but the urban area surely has parks and riverbanks as well as streets.

Control markers - nah. Question and answer. As I write this I'm looking at the city-provided map of the botanical gardens, on it are hand-drawn circles, on the back are control descriptions and questions. And if you don't want to be the planner for every event, use a score format. Novice planners can handle that much easier.

Here's what you've got:
-- friends
-- maps, but not O' maps

Here's what you need:
-- markers
-- a course on a map

Given the situation you describe, you don't need officially sanctioned orienteering. You just need to make a course on any map (examples from above), some rudimentary markers (examples from above), and that's it.

If you've got a group of four friends, take turns, one course per month. Since the hypothetical "you" has the most experience, you host the first one, and you help create some of the basemaps. Tell people about it on Facebook, and include a social afterward or something.

The key is to make the courses fun, and fair, given the limitations of the map. That's what will keep people interested. You also need to keep the "hosting" duties as simple as possible, otherwise you'll lose the folks that aren't as motivated as you are, and you'll end up doing all of the work.

If it grows much beyond the small group of friends, then you can consider making a "real" map with OCAD6, and start talking about forming a legitimate club, yadda yadda yadda. But even if it just stays within the circle of friends, you've got enough going to keep you guys happy for a while.

What's timely about this... is that I've basically started doing this in reality, with urban orienteering. I wanted to have more urban orienteering events in my neighborhood, ones that were smaller in scale than what's on the market. So I got a group of friends together, and we're basically doing exactly as I outlined above. And it seems to be working so far...

...make a campus map...I know this is heavily weighted toward sprints but Sprints make up almost 30% of the WOC races....

Perhaps so. But isn't that for the benefit of spectators, not the orienteers? What is the "essence" of orienteering that we are trying to capture here? Isn't it the uplifting sense of freedom...of just running wild through nature?

If you're starting an orienteering program from scratch, without maps or infrastructure, IMO you first have to select the BEST AREA that will get newcomers excited about the sport's potential, so there will be a second event. I don't think running around the campus will be particularly uplifting, for anyone.

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized.... Daniel Burnham, Chicago Urban Planner, 1908.

While running wild through nature is certainly fabulous, the essence of orienteering (to me) is navigating on the run. And that's certainly fun on a campus or on city streets. I've hosted a few social urban events like what Patrick is talking about, and I don't think I've had anybody try it and not say something along the lines of, "Wow, that's really fun!"

Don't underestimate how unfamiliar people are with the concept of "maprunning", and how even the simplest area (to us) can be really exciting to a newcomer. Also, cities and campuses have a lot of interesting details that you can bring to people's attention on courses like this, which make the whole thing even more fun.

Thanks guys - I'm liking a lot of what I read.

It was about 10 years ago now that I tried to start an orienteering program at a Boy Scout camp, trying to follow the USOF model. I was a beginner myself, and I found it nearly impossible to implement. The old USOF course setting guidelines had some good concepts, but there was no resource explaining how I could duct-tape together a program using low quality maps on a small budget. The resources I did have spent a lot of time pontificating on how to make your own maps, which was a red herring. Until I found some expert guidance, that was way outside my skill level.

I'd love to develop an outline that would show how 4-5 reasonably motivated college students could get together and 'go orienteering' without having to do more than a couple hours of prep work. And still have fun. If you can make that outline clear enough, I think people would do it.

Nowdays, I'm convinced that great sporting innovation comes from young adults just fooling around. Hell, last weekend I watched an intercollegiate Quidditch match. College students will do some crazy stuff.

Try something like this...

http://oobrien.com/oom/

Here's what I started last month (mentioned above).

If only I lived in a place where you could get high quality maps off the shelf. I know places like that exist.
http://kartat.eniro.fi/

But no, I was living smack dab in the middle of some of the most stunning orienteering terrain you'll ever see. Fast open hemlock/fir forest. Complex topography. Small ponds. Large lakes. Amazing vistas. I've done some really great off trail runs up there. But these were (and are) the two map options in the area I was at:

USGS
Trail Map

I wound up, through trial and error, using either one or the other, depending on which skill I needed to teach.

You know, the best analogy I can come up with. Hopefully it makes sense to non-climbers.

It's like I live right next door to an undiscovered Yosemite (before people drilled a few thousand holes in the cliffs to put up bolts for protection). It's a big wall, trad climber paradise. But when I looked to Climbing-USA for guidance on how to start climbing, all I found were sport climbers. They never climb without bolts for protection.

So instead of telling me how to start trad climbing, they told me "well, the first thing you need to do is install a few hundred bolts." And what's more, I found out they kind-of like to badmouth the trad climbers for sloppy technique. You know, stuff like this: Oh, those are just Adventure Climbers, those AC guys don't do real climbing.

I expect in five years, if not sooner, public domain mapping resources will be more than sufficient to make maps that rival, or simply surpass, some of those currently being used for some meets in the US. For most of the US. Without too much technical expertise required.

Until then, USGS continues to be an alternative, but soon, IMO, a very obsolete one.

OOM shows one approach. I think there will be others.

I think you're right J-man, Remote mapping is moving very quickly and publicly available topographic data is coming fast. Even the user interface that will let novices print their own maps should be getting here soon. The availability of such amazing maps could be leveraged very well to hype the sport. So the technology is already reaching out to bridge this gulf.

But even with great topo maps, it looks like accurate trail placement and vegetation will probably lag for a couple more decades. So these still wont be the "specially created, highly detailed maps" that Orienteering USA says you need to have fair competition. I'd really like to find a model that doesn't require field checking. Once I field check a place, it's not so fun to orienteer there anymore. I've already seen it all.

I'll bet that gear wonky outdoorsmen (and outdoorswomen) will start to get really stoked once people start printing lidar based maps of their favorite wilderness area. Can the prexisting orienteering community jump ahead of this curve, and be prepared to offer an activity that utilizes that? So weekend warriors can use these maps to have a 'real' orienteering challenge, even if it's not quite the standard model?

kupackman has got it. Urban is where its at. Map style that the layman is used to. Question and answer controls. He ALMOST uses the term "treasure hunt".

Around here events like this rescued a club that was in danger of folding up. It now runs 25-30 events a year.

By comparison another club in difficulties pulled back to running a couple of "proper" orienteering events a year. That club is no more.

another option is to use identifiable features on a USGS map, but before you go out, put GPS coordinates of the control locations into a GPS. Then navigate via map and compass, but you can whip out the GPS to verify you've actually arrived at the correct location.

I've seen many fun and worthwhile event conducted using the typical tourist maps of campuses, resorts, etc. The typical university or college has a map they give to all newcomers and while it is by no means an IOF standard orienteering map, you can still have a lot of fun with it. Using the Trivia-O format by having people take a golf pencil and answer questions (what is the date on the cornerstone, how many rose bushes in the planting, what was invented by the person in the statue...), you can turn any campus or tourist site into a game board. And orienteers are the pieces that move around that board! You don't need to put out any controls.

This has even been done on the National Mall in Washington DC, with the standard tourist map, which just happens to be 1:10,000!