Morgan Territory Regional Preserve
Date: (Sun.) Nov. 22, 2009
Location: Livermore, CA
Event Directors: 
- 510.604.2688, - 415.948.5593
Course Setter: Damian Swift
Type: B; Morgan Territory is always a great venue, and Damian (who hails from New Mexico Orienteering) will be setting his first courses for BAOC
Course Setter's Notes
By Damian Swift
Venue
Morgan Territory is BAOC's nicest venue relatively close to the urban Bay Area. It is a mixture of oak forest with large areas of grassland, and some fight. It is not as steep as many of our Bay Area parks, but still has significant hills and some crags.
Hazards
Notable aspects of the park, and you'll understand this is not exhaustive in a legally binding sense, include:
- Disused fencing in some of the advanced areas. Watch out for loops of rusty barbed wire.
- There have been ranch vehicles operating in the past few weeks, so watch out along the wider tracks.
- Cattle with calves: you city folks dursn't go a-scarin' them critters. I refrained from using them as control features, except on the advanced courses.
- Although the poison oak has lost its delightful, succulent foliage of the summer and early fall, advanced runners may be fortunate enough to see the stems of this versatile herb in sylvan areas.
Courses
- The White course is a straightforward trail loop with controls at or near junctions.
- Yellow is an extension of White with some controls off, but easy commuting from, the trails. A couple of Yellow legs offer straightforward route choice: cutting a corner instead of following the trail.
- Orange is a tour around distinct features with helpful attack points and catching lines, but offering some route choice and off-trail action.
- The Advanced courses are intended to strain the sinews of your being in every fiber, with legs designed to test route choice, accuracy, contour awareness, coarse/fine navigational mojo, and "least-squares orienteering" where the ground may bear only a passing resemblance to the map (e.g., the eternal question "Is that a clearing or just a gap between the trees?") The Red and Blue courses include a leg that may optionally take you down steep terrain: please be careful or check your insurance.
I would like to acknowledge helpful comments from Graeme Ackland on the Green-to-Blue courses. (Graeme "came first" in the U.S. Champs a few years ago, but failed to "win" owing to an incorrect choice of nationality.)
Start Areas and Finish
The Start and Finish for all courses are close to the main Morgan Territory trailhead. So those people who, like me, end up rushing late to events only to find there's a remote start offering a lovely aerobic warm-up double before the last start time, possibly in the wrong direction allowing a refreshing sprint back again, may be disappointed. (Real orienteers don't read pre-event notes.)
Please be sure and clear and check your finger stick before your start time. When the signal is given, place your finger stick in the Start unit and follow the streamers to the start triangle. Be sure to take the proper map, and then begin to navigate to your first control.
The Finish will be near the assembly area.
Map Comments
The map, originally by Zoran Krivokapic in 2001, is generally still accurate. I will try to make a couple of updates before we print, affecting Blue particularly.
The map does not accurately represent animal trials, which should be borne in mind on Orange–Blue. Some old trails have faded or evolved, and there are some distinct, unmapped trails. Some areas of the park have many more rocks than shown, recent meteorites no doubt, but I don't think they materially affect any course.
A green circle indicates a distinct or lone tree, and a green × indicates a standing dead tree. A brown × indicates a dead tree that has fallen down, but that usually does not have a significant amount of dirt on the roots.
Course Statistics
Here are the final course statistics. (Note that they have changed since the original publication of these Notes.)
Course Distance Climb Controls Technical Difficulty
White 1.9 km 65 m 10 Beginner Yellow 3.2 km 70 m 10 Advanced Beginner Orange 3.7 km 105 m 11 Intermediate Brown 3.4 km 85 m 13 Advanced Green 5.5 km 175 m 14 Advanced Red 5.8 km 335 m 15 Advanced Blue 7.0 km 350 m 16 Advanced
The Blue course includes a lot of tradeoff between distance and climb.