Table of Contents

OOC takes top honours at 2008 Canadian Orienteering Championships

National team sends it thanks on a very interesting map

JWOC results

Juniors end season by going loopy in Pinhey Forest

Our newest Orienteer - Dylan Revells

Charles Caccia

Training Maps

Anza-Borrego Desert O-Fest

This page is intended for member contributions,or anything of note that does not fit into the other pages. Have you been to a meet in an interesting terrain, with a difference, had a fun/strange/great experience while orienteering, something you would like to write about. Do send your article for us all to enjoy in html format or word, with or without pictures to .

OOC takes top honours at 2008 Canadian Orienteering Championships

The Ottawa Orienteering Club, with 31 entrants, took top honours at this year's Canadian Orienteering Championships held in Fundy National Park, NB. Taking 36 medals in all, 14 of them first place medals, OOC was soundly ahead of any other club in the country - hometown Moncton with 27 entrants taking 23 medals being the closest contendors. Of special note were Laura Teutsch, taking 3 firsts for the second year in a row, and Emily Kemp, who, running up by 4 years, placed first in sprint and third in middle and long against the best women in the country. Other first place winners were Alex Teutsch, (middle and long); Brian Graham, long;, Molly Kemp, middle (second in sprint and long); Bill Anderson, middle; Michael MacConaill, sprint and middle; Marketa Graham, sprint; Gord Hunter, long and Richard Aronoff, Open5.

As a warm-up to the championships, participants took part in the Fishbones - a three event, low-key, fun event in Saint John and then ran the ocean floor at Hopewell Rocks. This event proved very popular as participants sprinted amongst the pillars and tourists in a race with the Fundy tides. How do you tell one pillar from another?

See full results at http://www.orienteering.nb.ca/coc2008/index.html, a summary of OOC results highlighting top 3 Canadians and look for pictures on Flickr - tagged COC 2008 orienteering and at http://orienteering.smugmug.com

Here is a crossword about OOC at the COCs

National team sends its thanks on a very interesting sprint map

The National senior team has sent OOC its thanks for the support we have given to the high performance program. This map is from the Womens Sprint qualification - 3 courses on one map!

Click here to see full size map

JWOC results

The Junior World Orienteering Championships (JWOC) started Monday 30-June in Gothenburg, Sweden, with the Sprint distance. The Ottawa Orienteering Club has two competitors representing Canada in the events. Runners from 37 nations are competing. Emily Kemp did a fantastic race in the sprint and placed 38th out of 127 competitors, with a time of 15.04. Winner was Emma Klingenberg from Denmark in 13.40. The course was 2.6km long. Robbie Anderson came 124 out of 173 competitors with a time of 16.50 on the 2.8km course. Stepan Kodeda from the Check Republic won in 13.21.

In the Middle qualifier race on Wednesday, Emily came 10th in her group with a time of 30.46 while the winning time was 26.53. Robbie, with the strongest of the Canadian men's results, was 43rd with a time of 39.34. The winning time there was 27.04.

You can find full results, maps and route choices of top runners and follow the events live at http://www.gmok.nu/jwoc2008/index.php

The Canadian Junior Team has sent a postcard to OOC to thank us for our contribution to the support of the National Team. An image of the card follows:

Juniors end season by going loopy in Pinhey Forest

The OOC Junior Squad completed another successful training season with a fun exercise in Pinhey Forest south of Slack Road followed by a pizza dinner at Pizza Hut.

The training exercise focused on precision map reading, practicing control taking with Sport Ident punching, and improving speed & flow into and out of the control sites.

Twenty-one controls were placed in a 1.6 km loop, many on very similar features close to each another. There were four different maps. The first three maps had 7 controls each; the forth map had 10 controls. The objective was to travel around each of the loops as fast a possible.

Runners were able to practice on the first three loops with rests in between loops. All were running for gold on the forth & final loop DDD.

Below are the times of the juniors and coaches on the final loop.

	Robbie	8:17
	Emily	8:38
	Randy	9:48
	Jeff	9:55
	Adrian	10:32
	Molly	11:50
	Alexander	12.:25
	Stefan	13:04
	Alex	14.32
	Kim	15:08
	Victor	17:25
	Ian	20:11

Two of our juniors, Emily and Robbie, will be heading to Gothenburg, Sweden for the Junior World Orienteering Championships from June 29 to July 6. Results will be posted on the JWOC website at: www.gmok.nu/jwoc2008

Editor's comment -- well done Juniors - Good to see you beating the Dad's. Watch out Adrian - your turn next!

Newest Orienteer - Dylan Revells

We had a healthy baby boy last Tuesday, May 6th. Dylan Christopher Revells weighed in at 8lbs and 1oz. He is adorable! Keeping us busy for sure. We're all doing great (besides being a little tired). Cameron is enjoying his little brother as well (he was very happy to hear the baby was a boy!).

The photos are from when he was a few days old.

Cherie and Mike

- Cherie and Mike

Charles Caccia

Ottawa Orienteering loses a friend.

Charles Caccia took up orienteering while still a Liberal MP and continued participating after retiring from politics and living in Ottawa. Member of Loup Garou and erstwhile active member of OOC he is remembered as a true gentleman and friend of the environment. He was a strong environmental advocate while an MP and in the years following. He encouraged meet organizers to be careful of environmental issues when planning their courses.

He will be missed by all who knew him. Our condolences to his friends and family.

See McGarry Family ChapelsMcGarry Family Chapels for picture and visiting information.

Training Maps

I appreciated Randy's efforts to set up a permanent course on the Cité- des-Jeunes map. Until the flagging tape vanished, I used my crumbling copy of that map year round. Snowshoe orienteering was great but the GREEN in mid-summer was nasty.

For training, I use my old race maps. However, members of our club do too good a job at removing the tape during control pick-up. For those of us navigationally challenged, our training is so enhanced by the confirmation of that tiny little piece of flourescent tape.

Is it possible that once a year we can leave the tape out on one of our events in the Gatineau? If the tape survives that year in the wild, I'll collect it.

I would expect users to pay for the printing of extra copies of the maps of that particular event. However, we could save on that expense by simply leaving that one map available on our web site for the year.

What are your thoughts?

David Agar

dagar@ncf.ca

Anza-Borrego Annual Desert O-Fest

Each Martin Luther King long-weekend in January, the San Diego Orienteering Club organizes a two-day A-Meet in the Anza-Borrego Desert in California. This year it was January 19-21. The Anza Borrego Desert is the largest desert in California. It is generally lesser known because it is a State Park rather than a National Park. It is located about 1˝ hours east of San Diego, 1 hour south of Palm Springs, and just west of the Salton Sea.

The area in the Anza-Borrego desert mapped out and used for the meet was Buttes Pass. The location is about one mile off the main highway on a sandy road. Day one used the eastern part of the area and day two used the western part. Of the two days, day one was by far the more difficult. In U.S. orienteering meets, colors are used to denote the level of difficulty. I registered for open courses Orange (intermediate) on day one and Brown (short-advanced) on day two.

The area comprised steep gullies, ridges, and cliffs, all covered by loose rock. Considerable care needed to be taken not to slip, especially when going up and down the gullies. The similarity of the features each day made navigating a challenge. Properly reading the contour lines was critical. Visually, one ridge looked like the next. The terrain was very different when compared to Gatineau Park: no ponds, no power lines, few distinct trails, and the landscape each day was fairly constant - day one had essentially no vegetation, and day two had small scruff. On day one I took my time and was careful not to slip, but on day two I moved a little faster and walked into a couple of small cacti. I was not wearing shin pads, and it was a challenge pulling the cacti out without getting them stuck in my fingers.

The weather was fine for orienteering. It was cool in the morning and evening, near the freezing mark, but once the sun was up, the temperature reached 65-70 Fahrenheit which was comfortable. Many participants camped out at the site. I stayed in a motel about 20 minutes away in the town of Borrego Springs. I met a lot of interesting people there. Most were from California and adjacent states. There was one couple from British Columbia who were vacationing in California for the winter.

Given the risk of injury from the terrain and the distance from a city, a number of additional safety procedures were in place. During the weekend, officials from the San Diego Fire Department volunteered their first aid services. In addition, a group of radio buffs, also from San Diego, took up position along the tall cliffs to monitor the participants.

Overall, I enjoyed my desert orienteering experience. Given the choice, however, I prefer the forest.

Richard Aronoff

National Team Member and Ottawa native, Jon Torrance, also took part in the Anza-Borrego meet and sent this report

Having heard very good word of mouth for past editions, I also made the trek to San Diego, in my case, from Washington, DC.

I ran the blue course both Saturday and Sunday as well as a sprint on Saturday and the Maze-O on Sunday (more on this later). It wasn't a very good weekend of orienteering for me technically but the terrain was both fantastic and otherworldly - moderately to extremely complicated spur and reentrant terrain, mostly rocky. Saturday had very complex route choices and a high risk of losing contact and making a parallel error (which I did, massively). It was very fast sandy terrain with mostly more subtle spurs and reentrants and a high risk in places of having the ground crumble under your foot as you ran through an area of prairie dog burrows.

Then, on Sunday, the Maze-O, a low key and aptly named score orienteering event in a stunningly complex area of eroded badlands, cliffs and slot canyons often barely wide enough for a single person to pass through, with the walk to the start being through the deepest slot canyon in the area.

There was some risk of picking up cactus thorns both days. In retrospect, I'd say running in shorts was ideal from that point of view since it left less for the thorns to grab on to, though wearing shorts involved a compensating risk of losing some skin if one fell on a bare rock slope - and also of dehydration if one didn't drink enough more than usual to compensate for the extremely dry air.

However, these, and a few not quite perfectly hung controls, were minor problems in an extremely enjoyable weekend of orienteering. I'd recommend it to anyone in Ottawa in the mood for an orienteering vacation in the middle of winter (hey, it's cheaper than flying to South Africa, Australia or New Zealand).

Looking forward to seeing fellow OOC members at the US Relay Champs and other spring A meets, including the Canadian Team Trials in that by now to me exotic terrain, Gatineau Park and its environs - much thanks for deciding to host the trials and thereby forcefully pushing Ottawa into my orienteering travel plans after several years of conflicts with other events semingly every time OOC hosted an A meet.

Jon Torrance