Race Details

Categories and Courses

There are three types of course / category you can sign up for:

Male / Female age classes
Race against your peers on the assigned course over three days of competition. The top 3 overall in each class will be recognized with prizes at the end of the weekend.  The top 3 eligible finishers in youth and elite classes will receive Ontario medals; for adult (35+) categories, only a first place Ontario medal will be awarded.  Here is how eligibility is defined by Orienteering Ontario:  "You are eligible for the Ontario Orienteering Championships if you are a member of an Ontario orienteering club OR if you are an Ontario resident who belongs to any orienteering club affiliated with Orienteering Canada."
Open classes
Choose the course you want to run - results will be kept and published but no prizes will be awarded.
Group classes
If you want to be out on course together with one or more friends or family members, this is for you.  

Note: If this might be your first Canada Cup meet you may want to read this description of how it differs from your casual non-competitive event.  It will also give you greater detail about your class options.

Course / Class Table

Age classes are assigned to courses based on the following table. Note that if you wish, you may register in classes "above your age class" up to M21 or F21  are under 21 years old, and "below your age class", down to M21 or F21 if you are over 35 years old.  Note also, that new this year, Orienteering Canada has introduced 16-S and 20-S classes for both Male and Female.  "S", for "short" is to allow people to participate in a technically challenging but shorter course than the competitive 20- and 21 courses.

Middle and Chase Long
CourseMale ClassesFemale ClassesOpen ClassesGroup Classes
1 M10- F10- Open 1 Group 1
2 M12- F12- Open 2 Group 2
3 M14-, M16-S F14-, F16-S Open 3 Group 3
4 M16- F16- Open 4 Group 4
5 M75+, M80+, M85+, M90+

F75+, F80+, F85+, F90+

Open 5 Group 5
6 M20-S, M65+ F18-, F20-S, F21S, F45+, F55+, F65+ Open 6 Group 6
7 M18-, M21S, M45+, M55+ F20-, F21, F35+    
8 M20-, M21, M35+      
Sprint
CourseMale ClassesFemale ClassesOpen ClassesGroup Classes
1 M10- F10- Open 1 Group 1
2 M12-, M14-, M16-S F12-, F14-, F16-S Open 2 Group 2
3 M75+, M80+, M85+, M90+

F75+, F80+, F85+, F90+

Open 3 Group 3
4 M20-S, M65+ F20-S, F45+, F55+, F65+ Open 4 Group 4
5 M16-, M55+ F16-, F18-, F20-, F21, F21S,  F35+    
6 M18-, M20-, M21, M21S, M35+, M45+      

 Course Descriptions

If you are planning on signing up for an open class or are considering competing in an older or younger age class the following table contains information about each course to help you decide what class to register in.

Course

Technical Difficulty
(TD Level - description)

Middle RWT*
(min)
Long RWT*
(min)
Middle
Approx. Length
(km)
Long
Approx. Length
(km)
1 1 - Beginner 20-25 30-35 TBA TBA
2 2 - Easy intermediate 20-25 30-35 TBA TBA
3 3 - Hard intermediate 20-25 30-35 TBA TBA
4 3- Hard Intermediate 25-30 50-55 TBA TBA
5 4 - Advanced, less physical 30-35 45-50 TBA TBA
6 5 - Advanced 30-35 50-55 TBA TBA
7 5 - Advanced 30-35 60-70 TBA TBA
8 5 - Advanced 30-35 80-90 TBA TBA
CourseSprint RWT*
(min)
Sprint
Approx. Length
(km)
1 12-15 TBA
2 12-15 TBA
3 12-15 TBA
4 12-15 TBA
5 12-15 TBA
6 12-15 TBA

*RWT = Recommended Winning Times

Course assignment, technical difficulty and recommended winning times are as per Orienteering Canada's Course and Class Guidelines, February 2018.
Courses will be designed so that the fastest person on the course completes in roughly that amount of time. The approximate lengths shown above are what the resulting courses will likely be, based on how navigationally and physically challenging the terrain is.

Sprint Relay

A late addition to our events for O-Fest weekend is a Sprint Relay.  It will be held following the Sprint, using the same map and arena at Parc Moussette.  There will be four legs to the relay, with teams of two (two legs each) or four (one leg each) people.  The relay is an opportunity for people to try something different.  We encourage everyone to create a team!  Legs will be short (approximately 1.5 km) and courses will not be overly technical.  It will have a mass start - lots of fun and excitement, and definitely a different challenge for orienteers!

Registration for the Sprint Relay will take place on Saturday and Sunday - teams will sign up at the Registration/Information Desk.  Sign-up deadline is Sunday at end of race day.  Relay registration fee is a mere $10!

Start Lists

Start lists for the Long Event - by last name

                                             - by course

Terrain

Vorlage Ski Centre and Village of Wakefield

20180713 170539

There is a wide variety of terrain types on the Vorlage map but the dominant feature is the alpine ski slopes. All the forest is generally very runable but the best forests are on the higher elevations surrounding the ski centre.

Since this is an alpine ski area, there is a significant elevation change (120 metres) from the finish arena to the top of the runs. By having remote starts part way up, the individual climbs will be reasonable.

The village of Wakefield borders the south part of the map to the east. There will be navigating on roads, laneways, through wonderful sections of fields, and open forests with detailed contour, trail, rock and cliff features. In one particular area above the village there are so many indistinct mountain bike trails that including all of them made the map unreadable. In that area, only the main trails are mapped.

The Vorlage map has only been used once before, in 2017 for a Rogaine event. At that time the map did not show all the rock and cliff features, nor the vegetation types. The map has been updated since then to the ISOM 2017 standard.

On the ski slopes, there are many narrow interconnecting ski runs. Most of these will been shown with a thin black vegetation boundary line for readability. Although the ski slopes will have been mowed, and look really fast, caution is strongly advised when descending the steeper slopes due to uneven terrain.

North Gatineau Park from P17

This area has been remapped this past year by Jeff Teutsch.  His notes:

The terrain is quite varied - ranging from open farm fields (and former former farm fields) to extremely rugged forest with tons of cliffs, boulders, and scattered rock. There are plenty of steep slopes with lots of details on them. There are a couple of mountain bike trails going through the area and a few large paths (wide enough that a car can pass) but otherwise the forest is essentially devoid of trails. The forest varies from very open and runnable to thick sections with a mix of vegetation with low visibility where you will need to slow to a walk. The area being used has been specifically chosen to minimize the sections with thicker vegetation and maximize the nice woods with lots of contour and rock detail! There are also some old barbed wire fences from when the area was farmed that are still in the terrain and can be easy to trip over these have been mapped wherever they've been found.

 

The new map has been made to ISOM 2017. The only major change that you will notice from the previous map standard is that distinct vegetation boundaries are mapped with dark green dashed lines rather that a line of black dots. This should help avoid confusion between stony grounds and vegetation boundaries. There are lots of spots where it would be easy to confuse the two! The map has been made with the help of detailed lidar contours so everything should be positioned quite accurately and it has allowed for lots of accurate detail to be added to the map. That said a strict 1m minimum has been applied to boulders and cliffs alike and when in doubt features have been left off the map. There are still lots of features on the map though. I have tried as much as possible to stick to the minimum gaps between features as listed in the mapping standard but there are spots where this is simply not possible without oversimplifying areas with many small but distinct cliffs. In these areas I have left as much of a gap between symbols as I felt I could without making the cliffs too short or overly distorting the placement of the features. The mountain bike trails vary between quite indistinct and fairly visible in the terrain. The entirety of the mountain bike trails have been mapped with the small footpath symbol (even where it is indistinct in the terrain) so you can see all of the twists and turns.

Sprint and Sprint Relay

Also mapped in the last year by Jeff Teutsch

The O-Fest sprint area is a 1.3km long by 500 m wide section of mixed terrain on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. The area encompasses the Université de Québec en Outaouais, a residential neighbourhood with some shops and restaurants along the main the street, city park land and some wild fields and forest along the river. The forest contains some very complex contour detail and can be extremely rocky in places. Parts of it are quite open and runnable while others are a tangle of impassable shrubs and small trees. There is a dense trail network throughout creating a maze perfect for sprint orienteering! The fields have a mix of vegetation where you will need to change up your navigation. The university campus is typical urban orienteering and the park is what you would expect - lots of small features but open running on a compass bearing.  You will need to be prepared to mix up your orienteering techniques regularly to do well here!

Embargoes

Participants are not permitted to orienteer or explore Gatineau Park from P17, Wakefield or the Vorlage Ski area nor the area bounded by Tache Blvd and the Ottawa River in the city of Gatineau.

Old Maps

Click here for an old map of Lapeche  or here for the map of the Vorlage area from the 2017 ROGAINE.