Castle Rock, Saratoga
Practice Session
Wednesday, May 20, 1998, 6PM

I have prepared a training event at Castle Rock park in the Santa Cruz mountains. This is the second time we have an event in this park.

This park offers full fledge orienteering mostly in the woods. You will pass some open meadows. Runnability is pretty good, some of the line follows trails and roads. Poison oak is minimal, much less than last time we used this park. I have changed the route from last time to lessen exposure to poison oak and to avoid familiarity.

This exercise is geared towards people moving up from orange to brown or higher and people already doing advanced courses. This type of exercise teaches staying in touch with the map all the time. This is a very important skill on any course, critical on advanced courses.

The map is a slightly enhanced black and white USGS map. It has been enlarged to 1:12000 with 40 ft contours. It has been field checked somewhat and is marginally correct along the route used.

The format will be a line orienteering exercise. The object is to navigate along a line drawn on a premarked map and to mark each place a streamer is discovered. The route designed is approximately 5.5 km with 300 m of climb. There are a couple of places where you can make a shortcut and based on the scoring rules you don’t have to do the entire route to place in the scoring. Although you will see that number of streamers found is likely to be the deciding factor.

Streamers are hung at features such as hilltops, boulders, boulder fields, reentrants, spurs, and some other man made features. The streamers are not hanging randomly along the line.

Scoring rules: 5 points per streamer found - 1 or 5 points per minute used (1 point for minutes under 75, 5 points for minutes over 75).

The result of this is that someone who starts and finishes within one minute with no streamers found will score 0. That may not be the lowest score. To score higher than 0 you need to find a streamer more often than every 5 minutes on average. This should encourage people to keep moving and not hesitate if you don’t see a streamer.

Time: 6 pm. (Individual start with 1 min spacing)

Directions: Take Highway 9 from Saratoga to Skyline. Turn left onto Skyline. Go for about 1 mile. There is a parking lot on the left for the trailhead to the Summit Rock. This is where we will gather. If you find the Castle Rock parking lot you gone to far.

See you there!

Kent Ohlund.