Training Log Archive: levitin

Greenbush Green, day 2. This course was on the side of the map with a real trail network. Yet the legs were just as much of a challenge as yesterday. Light rain, wet vegetation. My shoes were squishing by the 2nd leg. A large open area with some scattered trees confused me on the long leg to #6, because it was mapped as solid yellow. Tens of minutes later, I relocated, and managed to find #6, and the nearby #7, but within another leg or 2 became unrelocatable. I decided to bail to the trail and walk it out.

Very confusing terrain. We in New England just don't have depressions that are multiple contours (20+m) deep. In theory, it should be possible to be in contact with the large depression that you're on the edge of, and contour around without falling to the bottom of it, keeping track of your position around its edge all the while. In practice, this is a skill I can't do yet, among wet, featureless woods.

Looking at Daniel's (Yellow) map, I noticed his clues obscured a slightly different part of this yellow (open) portion of the map. They showed a couple of strips of dark green inside the yellow. Incredible as it seemed, I wondered whether I had gotten mis-oriented and run into one of these strips of dark green.

After making the Quickroute combination of the map-scan + GPS track, I learned I was nowhere near those green strips. I was in the area mapped as solid yellow, in which there were significant vegetation features that should have been mapped.

Did this map have any updates made at all in the last 10 years?

Green - Splits

Event: Greenbush 2-Day
 

Greenbush Green. It was both very Green and bushy. Some of the green was hard to move through, and very difficult to see through to ascertain the shape of the ground. There was no model map, and this was my first time on this map (orienteering in this state, in fact). Very complex ups and downs, and more than once I went up when I needed to be down or vice versa.

Major error on Green #4, (SA says 22+ minutes) where I was in a depression that I thought should be the one I wanted, but it had no flag in it. I couldn't make sense of the terrain, and I relocated with difficulty using the edge of the forest/beginning of the cultivated area at the edge of the map. When I finally returned to the correct depression, the first depression where I was confused was adjacent to the one my flag was in.

Green - Splits

Prospect Hill.