Swanson Road - Oct 14, 2012

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For the second consecutive year Quantico Orienteering Club had an orienteering meet in the Swanson Road Natural Area. Once again I was the meet director. On the whole I think this year's meet went well. The weather was much nicer and we had a significantly bigger turn out than last year. My biggest task leading up to the meet was recruiting people to help run the event. I wasn't completely successful in getting enough volunteers prior to the day of the meet but luckily some people stepped up at the meet to help out.

I bought more food this year than I did last year. In addition to lots of water, this year I bought 30 apples, 20 oranges, 4 one pound bags of pretzels, and 3 two pound packs of cookies. I was worried early in the day that I might have bought too much but by the end of the afternoon it was all gone.

Missteps

I may have focused a little too heavily on volunteer recruiting and buying supplies for this event. I feel as if I did not give enough time to other things like coordinating with the course designer and making sure I had everything I needed, like course notes. The course designer for the 2011 Swanson Road meet (who also happens to be the club's president) was much more pro-active than the one I was working with this year. Last year we communicated quite a bit in the week leading up to the event. That was not the case this year and I am at least partly to blame for the lack of communication.

Another area where I think I failed was in preparing the bulletin board that goes next to the registration table. It was sorely lacking in information. It should have included a copy of the meet announcement and the course notes. I did not press the course setter for course notes and he did not produce any. I also didn't realize that he wasn't going to be at the event until the night before when I was notified by one of the officers of the club. Still, I should have made a better effort to keep an open line of communication with the course setter, difficult as that might have been considering that he doesn't use e-mail and his only phone is a landline.

At the very least the bulletin board by the registration table should have included that following:
- a list of the courses offered (color, level of difficulty, control count, distance, elevation)
- a warning about areas of the map that need work (to put it politely)
- a warning about giving a wide berth to the Prince George's Radio Control Club's activities

The map

It needs some work. There are areas that are marked in white that aren't as open as the map would lead you to believe. There are also sections of the map, from what I have been told, where the contours are not representative of the actual terrain. If the map isn't updated by the next time it is used then, as indicated above, a warning should be posted for those who will be looking for controls in the areas where the map is known to be inaccurate.


A not so easy white course

The white course, one of the beginner level courses, was more difficult than it should have been. In order to find the 6th, 7th, and 8th controls on that course you needed to follow the telephone lines through some fairly thick undergrowth. I had one of the volunteers go out and place streamers through that section but that was after a number of people had attempted the course. Even with the streamers it still would have been a slog and quite difficult for anyone unfamiliar with orienteering or off-trail hiking.


Control pickup

Because the course designer wasn't at the meet I took care of organizing a group of volunteers for control pickup. I wasn't successful in getting enough volunteers for this task before the meet. One volunteer backed out at the last minute due to an injury he sustained while orienteering. In the end I managed to get five people to help me with control pickup.

After parceling out the controls I left myself with 10 controls to pickup. It took me about 70 minutes to find them all and lug them, plus two gallons of water, back to the start. During that stretch I also collected roughly half of the streamers that one of the volunteers put out for the white course. I didn't get to see all of the park but it was nice to see more than just the area surrounding the start/finish. According to my watch I walked about 2.75 miles.

While picking up controls I tripped over the remains of a barbed wire fence. I fell flat on my face but didn't sustain any injuries. When I got home I found a big tear in one of my shoes that wasn't there before; must have been the wire fence I tripped over. I'm glad I was wearing an old pair of shoes.

End of the day confusion

We had a little bit of drama after I got back from control pickup. We thought that one of the volunteers was still out looking for controls. We came to that conclusion because the control boxes he was supposed to pickup were missing. A couple people drove out to look for him. About ten minutes later we discovered that we had the missing flags but not the control boxes. After a couple phone calls, including one to the search party, we concluded that the missing control boxes must be in a bag that some else took home with them. This was confirmed later in the evening by e-mail.

Link: Swanson Road Results