Sunday Snow Fun

This morning, I went to an orienteering event near Lake Sebago in Harriman Park. I tried out an Orange course, which is the intermediate course. Here's the course map. The controls are circled in red. I've highlighed the route I took in yellow:

The straight distance from marker to marker was about 2 miles, so I probably did about 3 miles. I finished in 82 minutes.

The only wrinkle was that, at control #3, I realized that I had lost my control card, so I went back to control #2 to look for it. I was unable to find it, so I went back to control #3 and punched my map instead. That was a mistake - I should have punched my map at #3, gone back to find the card, and then I could have gone right to control #4.

It was great fun, and I'm looking forward to trying an advanced course next time.

At control #7, I was photographed by a photographer for the Poughkeepsie Journal's Thursday Sports section. If only my PE teachers could see me now...

Update: The photographer, Nancy Haggarty, send me some of the pictures she took:

After that, I decided I wanted to try out the old sailboat we were given last week from a guy named Ray who wanted to get rid of it. So I took Mechel for a boat ride.

In the front yard.

Note to self: even though it's made of fiberglass, an 11 foot long sailboat is REALLY hard to push through wet, sticky snow. Without the snowshoes it would have been impossible to push the boat.

My snowshoe appears to be well balanced, as it's perfectly level when I take a step:

Then I cleaned the garage. Just a typical low-key Sunday at the Wymore home.

So what's the alternative?

Cox and Forkum

Family orienteering hike

Last week, a co-worker was telling me about orienteering. Turns out that there's a Hudson Valley club. There's an event next week at Lake Sebago in Harriman Park. Anyway, he lent me an orienteering map from the 1979 Orienteering World Cup. The course used for that tournament has been made permanent, meaning that the control markers are still maintained. Here's the chunk of the map we used (reprinted rather small so as not to run afoul of copyright violations):

I rented a pair of snowshoes for Trish and off we went. In Harriman, the snow was about 18" deep. We started out by heading SE from Tiorati Circle, then hiking up the road through the picnic area. We then hiked North into the reentrant to find Control 10:

From there, I took a bearing on the map aiming for the bare hilltop SE of Control 10. After getting there, I took a bearing NE to Control 11. We found an old sign on a tree, and could tell it was an old control sign (the red portion was just visible in the lower left corner):

Update: I'm now somewhat convinced that this is not Control 11. I had forgotten the clue sheet at home, and it says that C11 is at the foot of the cliff, and we were still on top of the cliff.

From there, we could see the hill that Control 17 was on, so we hiked over there. Some folks had blazed a trail to the top already, so we followed that path to the top, where we spotted control 17:

Going a little farther East, we hit a marked trail that we took North to Control 18. By then, Mechel was becoming a little unstable, so we took a picture of it in the distance:

Heading back down the trail, we approached Control 16. I went to look for it while Trish waited at the trail junction. I couldn't find Control 16.

Update: Using GPSU, I checked the GPS logs (I didn't use the GPS while orienteering, or course) and determined that I had overshot the control area. Looking for two adjacent cliff-like rocks, I ended up searching around the pair to the SE of the control area. Note that both pairs of cliffs have a reentrant to their East. I was only 80 meters off, but it was enough to miss the control:

After that, we got to the road:

...And I took a little detour to find Control 12:

After finding the Control, I turned around to discover a partially devoured deer carcass in front of a small cave. Bobcat? Wolf? I didn't hang around to find out.

All in all, it was a lot of fun, and convinced me that I can actually do it. I'm looking forward to next Sunday!