Discussion: Surebridge Challenge News

We ordered a major spring cleaning of the woods and it was delivered in the form of a record breaking rain storm.

We have over 300 starters, a large crowd. The camp from which we start and finish on both days is small. It allows parking for about 80-90 cars, less if the ground is soft and swampy.

We ask people to carpool. Once the parking at the camp on Arden Valley Road is full, you have to use the overflow parking at Tiorati Circle, about 2 k from the camp. Competitors and their gear will be shuttled to the meet area from there.

Options:
Run or bike along the asphalt road to the camp (the area south of Arden Valley Rd are out of bounds).

You drop off your party at the camp and a late starter brings the car to Tiorati Circle.

People staying at the ETA camp please fill your cars and car pool.

At the assembly/start/finish there is a large semi-open building where you can leave your bags in the dry and change.

We use the same camp which was used for WOC 1993. It gives the best access to the great Surebridge Mt orienteering arena. Once you are at the camp, the start is nearby and the finish is in the camp.

Please visit the HVO website for more information. The meet notes will be posted soon. The course length and data is posted already.

The crew who put out control stands on Monday tells of wild ripping streams and juicy marshes. Since I am drawing up maps, I was ordered to stay home and work. Which I did and delivered the files. Looks like interesting courses, I would like to run, too.

Any chance someone could post a map of the ETA camp to help those of us arriving late on Friday night find appropriate buildings and places to set up tents? Or will there definitely be people there to direct us no matter how late we arrive? I'd bother the ETA staff but why force them to answer the same questions from every individual in this situation. Thanks.

Jon, I know the MD received a plan of who sleeps where. I ask her how the check-in works.

If you come late night, you have to be careful to take the correct road going off to the camp from Route 6. We usually place a control there, but at night it might hard to see. Bring your locator map!

The number punching night gremlins produced the start list. Enjoy!

Folks dont forget to Carpool !!! Parking is going to be very limited at the main camp. There is a good chance that YOU will be shuttled from tiorati circle. To make your life easier have your gear in a bag so that it is easy to carry along with you.

A message to the ETA camper who arrive late: "I am leaving a map of the sleeping location & registration cards with Guy there will be someone until about 8 pm (or 9PM)" Ellen Stibler, MD

Absolute brilliant sunshine over the valley. Great weather, almost warm.

It's predicted to be in the low 70's 100 miles north of Harriman, so be prepared for hot running.

Great meet HVO! Outstanding weekend at Harriman, and superb courses Daniel.

I look forward to the next one!

Yes, this was a great meet. Thanks everyone.

From here too -- thanks to Daniel & all the crew.

I enjoyed setting the courses at Surebridge very much. Starting at some sub freezing day in January (imagine hats, double gloves and frozen marshes) to the early morning red course control check run (imagine waking up hawks for their Attackpointing, chasing deer from their nest and almost getting lost on my own course) it was, to use the word for a last time, a real challenge.

I heard many positive comments, learned of interesting route choices I had never thought of and found that this part of the Surebridge map was ready to be (re-) discovered. With the help of so many people on our crew my slightly wild vision of setting courses came alive.

And the results are posted here

Hmmm, the HVO website isn't working... too many people checking results today?

Four pages of photos taken at Surebridge yetserday. Links to different sizes under each thumbnail. The (L)arge ones are full-res and mostly not rotated. I was limited to 60-70 shots, so I typically took 3-4 photos and deleted the really lousy ones on the fly - thus the big gaps in the image numbering. A few shots of the terrain in there. So fine!

Eddie, why did you just run one day?

Here's a handful of pictures, not feeling the muse so nothing really spectacular. Some from Day 1 and a couple around the ETA camp.

Thanks, Eddie!

I stepped in a hole between 16 and the GO control ~ 150m to go...one of those deep gaps between rocks...while working downhill. At first I was afraid I broke it, but it seems that I've just pulled a few muscles in my lower leg, mainly a muscle along the shin and the lower inside of the calf. No knee or ankle pain thankfully. I managed to hobble to the finish - whining like a wus with each step, praying that it wasn't broken :). I could barely put weight on it after finishing, but with ice and advil it recovered enough for walking. So I opted not to run on Sunday. It was soooo hard not to go out on Surebridge on a warm, sunny day. Nothing comes closer to orienteering bliss than Surebridge on a sunny day. Calf is still pretty tight today. Hopefully a few days of RICE will get it back in order.

Whassamatter with Surebridge in a cold driving rain? :-)

I agree, this was an amazing weekend! The terrain was as good as the best places in Sweden and the map was close to perfect. Many thanks to the organizers! Very well organized. I really enjoyed it!

Silly question--who is the guy in that picture above?

Thanks Ratlaf, to point to the dormant web site. Can't access it today. Got to the results yesterday just fine. Maybe we did have an overload. I sent a message to John Fredrickson, our web master.

Tried the Google cache trick, but their last harvesting was before our result posting.---

Weather: I have to concur with JJ. I absolutely enjoyed the perfect weather this weekend. It helped me to justify the course length, in bad weather the finish times would have increased exponentially.
But Surebridge in fog, snow and cutting winds is really cool. It has great moods and looks cool in almost every weather.

in bad weather the finish times would have increased exponentially

Hey, some of us are capable of that in any weather!

#282 is Robbie Anderson of OOC. He ran M-20.

For people having issues with the website, I just got notification from the host that the server that the HVO website is hosted on has been blocked by Bell and Verizon Residential. Hopefully it will be cleared shortly.

If you are not connecting through Bell and Verizon Residential and are still having issues, please let me know.

We can't get through on AOL dial-up either (whether using AOL's or Firefox's browser), as of a couple of minutes ago (Tues. morning).

They probably didn't appreciate the rush of everyone attempting to check out the results. I hope it's cleared up soon.

Heh, "the rush". ;-)

Soon we'll have sites that are "Attackpointed" instead of "Slashdotted".

What a great terrain - orienteering nirvana. I ran there in '96, I believe but I don't remember such a clean forest. I guess that comes from being in a area too far south for ice storms and too far north for tornadoes.
Does anyone know if the Surbridge courses will be posted on Route Gadget anywhere? Just comparing with other peoples split times doesn't quite do it for me anymore.

I am not sure if my Adobe Illustrator files would work on RouteGadget. I check what it is needed to upload the files. I would be very interested to see some route choices, since I heard all kind of surprising solutions to the courses I had set.

Gord Hunter on Attackpoint! Probably the last person you want to into a control with your head down, cause he'll have his shoulder down, elbows out. The army guys I coached always let Gord punch first.

We need a Sharon Crawford v. Gord Hunter smackdown.

(I've got Surebridge in 0CAD, so we could put together RouteGadget that way, but I think you can even use a scan, so I'll bet that Illustrator can output some compatible format.)

The RG software is not Mac compatible. - It appears RG wants a jpg of the map plus the course on a separate layer? Plus the SI data?

JJ: Thanks again for your file transformation. This made the 1:10,000 map possible and brought lots of fun for many people.

Mario spotted on the Blue map that 0CAD was written with a zero instead of an O (letter). Now I discover the same spelling in your post. Are you doing this on purpose? Maybe a secret meaning?

And now to the quiz question: Which leg on which blue course crossed an area where the contours are out of whack? (people in possession of the OCAD file are excluded from this quiz) The answer can be found on the map, if you find the right spot.

Here's another photo link.

I took a few at the Start on Day 1, and about 100 of miscellaneous people running from the GO control to the Finish on Day 2.

Maybe a secret meaning?

Yes, I always spell it that way, longstanding habit. Started as an inside joke that would only be understood by those of us who had to do some serious file hacking back in the early days of 0CAD 3 in order to get things to work properly. Bob Ellis is tha Attackpointer most tuned into this sort of thing these days. :-)

RG needs:
1) Generally starting from OCAD, a jpg of the blank map - size under 1 MB is good. I usually strip off all of the pretty stuff, and save at 150 dpi.
2) the courses in a mater course file - either in OCAD or Condes. If the courses weren't created this way, then they need to be. I can do this with the OCAD map and a copy of each course - sent as a PDF from A!?
3) the interface file from the split results for each day

I am happy to host an event on my RouteGadget site for clubs who don't have their own site.

The RG software is not Mac compatible

Hm... As far as I know there is lots of Mac users happily using RG over the web. Some has also installed it on Mac laptop.

Daniel, I saw at least 3 areas were contour goes into the cliff and does not get out - standard practice by mappers - # 7 Blue - day one was one of them :)

"...contour goes into the cliff and does not get out - standard practice by mappers..."

Hey Greg, I think that's being a bit loose with the language. Obviously this happens with some otherwise respected maps, but it happens more often with some mappers than others. ;-) To me, the only excuse for this is a lousy basemap where you had to move loads of contours. The Surebridge base was very good except under hemlock forest. Does that cover these instances?

secret meaning?
inside joke

Looking at an OCAD version 4.<something> file from back when I did a few local maps, the first 2 hex bytes of the file are "0C AD". Obviously part of the file header as designed by Hans. Not having touched OCAD since then I have no idea if current versions still do this.

As far as I know, they still do.

The area around #7 blue day 1 is one muddled area. #2 has also a bunch of ending and overlapping contours. The areas don't have very dense tree coverage, but the they are a) on the northern edge of the map and b) on a steep hill side.

If you follow the contours from #7, where the one contour appears to dissappear, to the North-East, the missing contour re-appears out of another cliff.

Possibly this is because that whole hillside with cliffs and whatnot is so steep that the two contours were so close together so as to be one line at this scale...?

Sounds like a good justification to me (shrug).

On this map, at least, all vanishing contours do reappear somewhere. On a complicated hillside with a lot of cliffs, it's a challenge to make sure that all of the lines continue straight through with no anomalies, and at a certain point the mapper has to decide whether it's worth the effort to make sure that they're all continuous, in an area where the runner isn't going to notice anyway. Having drafted quite a few maps, I can attest that disappearing contours aren't unusual, although a skillful cartographer can make them difficult to find. I've also run on some maps where contours do weird stuff all over the place, to the extent that route choice decisions are affected. That's not so much fun.

I'd especially like to say how nice it is to see White and Yellow courses printed on a 1:5000 map. I was just looking at the White courses tonight and they look great for young kids. I do hope other meet organizers will do this whenever possible.

I felt the trails pop out visually on the 1:5000. It makes navigation easier for beginners. Similar with 1:7,500 for yellow, orange and brown: The complex map is easier to understand and for older eyes easier to see.

Not to speak that each map had a different design which cost me some nights of sleep. Or the fact, that it might be against the rules for A-meets? I don't mind. I think as the course setter I am responsible to produce the best legible and useful maps. Rules are here to be broken, at times.