Discussion: Fun To Say map names

Granite Planite, Idontwannabe, Superfly Marsh...

We just don’t get these in the UK where everything is just the local place name, like ‘Bordon North’ or whatever. I’d love to have more fun-to-say names! I wonder why some countries have them (AUS/NZ do too) and others don’t?

Since Mikell's the mapmaker, he can call them anything he likes.

This page has the entire National Forest area, much of which he has mapped over the years. It's always a joy to orienteer there.

Using certain place names can be fun too, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Froze-to-Death_Mount...

Right, here we quite often use a funny place name on map as a map name, liket this HomePerseenSuo (translate one by one)
http://karten.guedels.ch/show_map.php?user=remoruc...

There is often too dirty place names to be used, but often these is just funny ones available.

I never thought someone living in the country of Nether Wallop, Matching Tye, or Drakeholes would complain about boring names.

I meant fun 'invented' names rather than actual place names. Because you're right, we have lots of the latter in the UK, especially if you use your imagination. And some of them do have orienteering maps - if you don't like dirty jokes, don't look at this map and certainly not this one.

Back in 2009, I was on a CascadeOC scouting trip to central Washington to look for a Middle distance venue that would be grouped with Fishtrap Lake (Long) and Camp Sekani (Sprint) for the 2010 SML US National Champs.

We ultimately selected the Moses Lake Sand Dunes, but we also toured three other areas of public land, two of which didn't have names. In my opinion, one of them had the most interesting terrain we saw that day, but it didn't have the logistical benefits of the Moses Lake dunes.

That area was in kind of in the middle of nowhere. Crab Creek bounds the area to the north, but Crab Creek runs 160 miles (though Moses Lake and all the way to the Columbia River), so it's not a really descriptive name. There's a BLM trailhead heading west on the other side of the road at the west end of the terrain, with a name of Goose Butte. Nothing on any map I've seen has this name, and it's unclear what butte the name is even referring to. (And whatever butte there is wouldn't be on the orienteering map).

Anyway, the point of all of this is that the four of us who visited this area that day named it Crabby Goose. It's almost become mythical in status because it's still never been mapped, nobody else has been there since, and it has a really weird name.

My personal favourite in Australia was the one where the mapper was instructed to call the map "whatever the sign says on the gate", which is how the map came to be known as Paradise No Shooting.