Discussion: Out-of-bounds areas

This is a reminder to event directors to announce very clearly, and use appropriate purple overprint symbols if you don't want people going in certain places. This weekend, I saw several potentially dangerous and damaging incidents that caused me concern.

Saturday: Uncrossable deer fence, more than 2 meters tall. At least two orienteers climbed over it, and at least 2 found places to slip under it. Gates were mapped that forced some tough route choice, but not everyone used them. Now on the map, the fence was just shown with the black line with double tags, so IOF rules say its legal to cross. But for safety reasons (and also to avoid damaging the fence & offending park officials), should it have been required to not cross it? At least one of the climbers was observed by non-orienteer hikers.

Saturday: flower bed. This was an ISOM map, and the garden was not even shown olive green , just a regular green shade. It didn't look like anything was sprouting yet, but we left obvious elephant tracks through the melting snow & soft earth. This could really tick off a park manager.

Saturday: ice covered lake. The temperature was warming and there were puddles on the surface. I don't think anyone was brave/stupid enough to try to cross it. But it wasn't expressly forbidden. But, see Sunday below.

Sunday: another ice covered lake. I watched 3 high school JROTC kids run straight across the middle. They survived. An adult 30-something orienteer was also observed doing the same. This lake probably was safely frozen, but I am sure park officials would have been horrified to see kids running across it, and certainly the consequences could have been catastrophic. Plus, the young juniors I was shadowing were upset that I would not let them cross when they saw others doing it.

So, now that it seems to be becoming widely known that on ISOM maps, "uncrossable" boundaries are just a suggestion, what can we as event organizers be doing to make sure that we don't have a tragedy or get thrown out of a park?

Maybe quell our urge to be overprotective? And let kids/adults make mistakes, get injured, and learn from them?

Orienteering can be a rugged sport. That's what we LIKE about it. Let's not emasculate it with good intentions.

Interesting, because I often take that same attitude that we are way too overprotective. But falling into a frozen lake can be a pretty unforgiving mistake.

It didn't look like anything was sprouting yet, but we left obvious elephant tracks through the melting snow & soft earth. This could really tick off a park manager.

The responsibility is upon the event organizer/Director to ask the park manager about the areas to avoid. If the park staff don't voice any concerns, it seems to be asking too much of the course setter to come up with all conceivable sensitive areas. There is common sense, but one person's common sense is not another's. Some people will object to stepping on downed logs, for they can conceivably harbor sensitive microorganisms. There are native Indian earthworks that I wouldn't ever be able to tell from, say, remnants of a 20th century development. There is a certain type of soil in California that is sensitive and/or protected, and park staff do always make a big deal of the need to stay off it, but I, just running through the area, would never know. It just looks like different soil.

To me personally a garden in winter is fair game unless it's private. If a park tells me, the course setter, to stay off, I will gladly comply, but I won't spend hours of my life worrying about environmental concerns. Other people are paid to do this.

Frozen lakes and high fences are different. The former is a safety and fairness issue, the latter is at least a fairness issue. I would expect the course setter's mind to be actively engaged when considering the possible use of these in her/his courses.

Sounds from another thread that this was a score event, which makes using course design to keep people away from lakes / fences very hard to achieve if the area is wrongly-shaped. (Possible response: don't hold score events in such areas, or make it clear to participants in advance that lakes / fences are uncrossable.)

I totally agree that we should not have been allowed to cross over the fence due to safety concerns and just plain respect for the park.
I agree that crossing under the fence should not be aloowed either because it is unfair.
Orienteers do crazy stuff in competition. Myself included. Before I started I made a decision not to climb the gates out of respect. My decision to gamble with crossing under the fence at the stream was based on past experience that you could get under at streams. Interestingly enough, all other stream crossings that I saw were impassable with new fence/water gates!

What are the rules in the US for lakes and olive green? Afaik, lakes are forbidden and olive green is just a descriptor in IOF norms.

"Saturday: flower bed. This was an ISOM map, and the garden was not even shown olive green"

In ISOM, olive green means 'settlement' (residential area), so it would make no sense to map a garden as this. However, if it was mapped to ISSOM (a sprint map), then yes, olive green would be a good choice as it means 'area with forbidden access', and is forbidden to cross.

NH is correct; my point was that the garden was not shown by any symbol whatever.

ndobbs - I will try to get it right...

In the USA rules there is nothing making lakes forbidden to cross.
On the other hand in the USA rules it is forbidden to enter private places.

In other words, I think you have it exactly backwards ;-)

(Just to confuse things - if you come north of the border into Canada then it will become forbidden to cross "uncrossable" features - so then I think you will be right about lakes being forbidden, but still wrong about olive green which is forbidden in both USA & Canada rules)

(Confused yet? Well, don't forget that if you are running a WRE in either Canada or the USA then IOF rules apply, in which case neither lakes nor olive green will be forbidden unless the bulletins say so)

Overprotective?

I guess that maybe the forbidden areas have an element of "avoiding danger" about them. But an equally important aspect is the respect to landowners and other park users - if an area is "in bad taste" or "illegal" to enter, then we should mark it out of bounds. Going into such areas will cause problems with future access to the area. We need to always show the greatest respect in this regard.

Going into such areas will cause problems with future access to the area....

Well if left to the "landowner" bureaucrats that normally administer our mapped areas, most of them prefer NO off-trail access, let alone access to lakes, cliffs and other "dangerous" features. We need to constantly reassert our right to go off-trail in a responsible manner in these public spaces.

Take access to "natural" lake ice for instance. I know of very few ponds and small lakes in the US that ice skating is permitted, despite many Currier & Ives prints of bygone skating parties. Most Americans have been brainwashed that natural ice is very dangerous...see OP. What a shame! In northern Europe natural ice skating is a whole different winter sport...here's a recent photo taken on Lake Mälaren in Stockholm, where tens of thousands of people skate on the ice when conditions are right. Why don't we allow that in the US?

Let's not give up our fight for access, by making excessive use of "Out of Bounds" markings on our maps. Or emasculating another sport in the US, that the rest of the world enjoys in the rugged, "dangerous" manner that was intended.

Clark, if people start falling off of fences and breaking their necks while orienteering then we risk losing access to the land, and no one will be participating in orienteering, "emasculated" (ugh) or not.

Once again, trying to change attitudes by insulting the people who make the rules generally isn't very productive. If we show safe and responsible use of off-trail terrain over and over and over again (and don't run through sensitive areas, or get people killed), then we will be able to use the land as often as we want and earn the trust of the land managers to hold all these events.

From an AP AR thread....
http://www.ar.attackpoint.org/discussionthread.jsp...

I know CAOC has had more than its share of land use problems, but from the tenor of Clark’s post, I have to wonder if the landowners are the problem. We (SLOC and Carol's Team) deal with over a dozen separate agencies from small private organizations to National Parks and National Forests. There are specific instances of access requests denied (or effectively denied, as in, you can use it, but you can’t run or you can’t leave the trail), but the overwhelming majority of our requests are quickly granted. The agencies we deal with the most don’t even ask to review our courses because they know we have a 30-year track record of providing competitors guidance on what shouldn’t be done and setting courses that don’t encourage breaking the rules. In short, we enjoy just the sort of “rugged freedom” that Clark longs for simply because we do NOT take the attitude he suggests.

There are times when righteous indignation is called for, but this is not one of them. Save it for civil rights or immigration reform. A bit of perspective and humility goes a fair ways when dealing with those in authority.

Both the Missouri Department of Conservation and Missouri State Parks have asked SLOC to train their land managers, naturalists, etc. in off-trail land navigation.

In northern Europe natural ice skating is a whole different winter sport...here's a recent photo taken on Lake Mälaren in Stockholm, where tens of thousands of people skate on the ice when conditions are right. Why don't we allow that in the US?

Maybe because in most of the US, it doesn't get as cold as it does in Sweden, so the ice doesn't get thick enough to be reliably safe. But people certainly go out onto it in New Hampshire.

...very few ponds and small lakes in the US that ice skating is permitted...

My comment tried to speak only about skate-worthy ice. That lake in NH is neither small nor skatable. It looks like a lot of rough going, compared to my pic of Lake Mälaren, where cars are forbidden.

Going out on ice is approached with a whole different attitude. Skaters in northern Europe carry self-rescue equipment, because going through the ice is certainly a possibility. The equipment may include: a pair of "dubs" on a string around the neck so a skater can pull himself out, a "pic" pole to test the ice, and dry clothes in a plastic waterproof bag inside their back pack to provide flotation. Skaters frequently travel for miles on incompletely frozen lakes and waterways, just a few feet from open water.

Contrary to expectation, northern Europe can have quite variable temps since the Gulf Stream terminates in those parts. It is not as cold as you'd expect. And without too many mountains, warm and cold air masses sweep across the area bringing multiple thaws and hard freezes during a single winter. But that is good, since lake ice is often melted and refrozen, making for fresh, smooth, hard...and snowless ice, as my "recent photo" above shows.

Anyone going to northern Europe during the winter should look into this wonderful sport. If you like XC skiing, you'll love skating for miles on natural ice. And for winter orienteering, or just running, crossing frozen lakes should be considered as a possible route choice, and not restricted by well-meaning meet directors.

I skate outdoors here in MA/NH/CT whenever conditions permit. I got two days in this year before the snow fell, on two different small lakes. I can easily think of at least a dozen lakes that I've skated on in these parts. I've never had anyone telling me to get off the ice.

(I get an error when I try to view your picture, by the way -- says I don't belong to the group.)

So if I am (hypothetically; not for a while, I think) an ED for an event in which there is a frozen-lake option, I see two ways for me to proceed that won't end putting competitors' lives in jeopardy. The first one is to check the competitors for the equipment necessary to survive the submersion before they head out on the course. That is, to require that pic pole, these dubs, and that plastic bag with dry clothes. The other is to tell them not to go there, not to set legs that would tempt them do cross, and disqualify everyone who does.

..I get an error...says I don't belong to the group...

Sorry jj...here's the direct Google link. The picture is of lake ice last week in Stockholm.

I must first say thanks Mike for the genrous 30 something, being just slightly older.
And bing the one that ran across the lake at the event. I unlike the other competors had weeks of pre-knowledge of the lakes ice thickness and had talked with ice fishers, drilled my own test holes, enjoyed running on the lake several times, and lived in the UP ah. I and I must say "I" knew the ice was safe. I think that Mike is right about the lake, all some young kid saw was an older orienteer running across a lake on a warm winter day and assumed that it must be safe. When in many Circumstance it may not have been. I for one, like the ruggedness and risks of orienteering and don't want to see that change, but I also don't want to see a youth orienteer get injerd. Then there will be more rules and padding, and eye protection, and helmets. By the way the only reason I ran across the lake was because it was more fun than running on trail next to the lake.

That's some sweet-looking ice, Clark. Almost as nice as the ice I skated on Dec. 20. (That ice was marginally thin, but totally worth it.)

Here are some amazing ice conditions in Sweden yesterday on Lake Vättern. The guy says in the beginning that they have the wind in their back and went "almost 70 km before lunch".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKQEtT2waqA&feature...

Wow that was a lot of work for the Zamboni driver. ;-)