Huddart Park
Date: (Sat.) Nov. 27, 2010
Location: Woodside, CA
Event Director: 
- 650.906.9672
Course Setters: Matthias Kohler, Greg Favor, Nick Corsano
Type: C; Long-awaited return to this beautiful park with White through Green courses (limited participation on Orange through Green)
Course Setters' Notes
By
Huddart Park is very popular with equestrians, so this is the prime directive: horses have the right of way! If you encounter one, wait by the side of the trail and let it go by. If you are bounding out of the woods onto a trail, stop and look for horses first. Our continued use of Huddart depends on maintaining good relations with the equestrian community.
Other things to know about the park: There is a $5 per-car entry fee. No dogs are allowed. Poison oak seems fairly sparse this fall. We are using the Zwierlein group picnic area as our base of operations. There is ample parking along the road. Registration, start, finish, picnic tables, and restrooms are all in close proximity.
Topographically, Huddart Park sits atop a mammoth re-entrant, running approximately south to north, and the two big adjacent spurs. The park entrance and almost all the developed facilities are on the eastern spur. The White, Yellow, and Orange courses have been set on the eastern spur. Brown and Green, on the other hand, cross that re-entrant, get up into the wilder areas of the park, then cross back. The biggest challenge for the course setters was to keep these crossings from being either trivial or brutal.
Redwoods dominate the park's vegetation, but there are large areas of oak/madrone and Douglas fir forest and chaparral. Generally, a green circle denotes a prominent or isolated live tree, and a green × denotes a prominent dead tree, usually a giant redwood stump. An oval of black dots (the vegetation-boundary symbol) usually indicates a ring of redwoods.
The park is quite steep, and the course statistics reflect that. These are the courses being offered:
Course Length Climb Controls Difficulty
White = COOL 1 1.9 km 105 m 11 Beginner Yellow = COOL 2 2.2 km 135 m 13 Advanced beginner Orange = COOL 3 3.3 km 275 m 16 Intermediate Brown = COOL 4 2.7 km 280 m 11 Advanced Green 3.3 km 360 m 14 Advanced
People new to orienteering should be aware that the distances shown above are the sums of the straight-line distances between controls. The actual distances people will cover on the courses will be longer — how much longer will depend on your route choices and errors.
In case you missed it in the event announcement, please note that the Orange, Brown, and Green courses are available only by reservation. If you don't already have a reservation, you can show up at the event and take your chances on there being an opening.
Here are some specific comments about the courses:
All the courses cross at least one of the park roads, and all except White have at least the option of following roads for various distances. Although traffic will be light, you should stay alert for cars.
White follows trails and a fire road. It's the best course for first-timers. It has a long climb, but on a very nice trail. White and Yellow go into different areas, so if White leaves you wanting more, doing Yellow as a second course is recommended.
Yellow is mostly on trail, but definitely requires you to stay alert and pay attention to the map. It traverses a wonderful variety of terrain. One of the controls is at a feature mapped with a black × and described as "man-made object". The feature is a bench.
Yellow and Orange cross at a road junction about midway through each course. There will be water there, but the spot is not shown on the map.
Orange has a lot of climb, but it is in fairly benign terrain, so you should be okay without cleats.
Brown and Green were designed to offer some interesting route-choice problems. They traverse some steep hillsides, so cleats or lug soles are strongly advised. There is a water control on each course. Both courses go under the high-power lines that cross the park. The vegetation directly beneath those power lines is very tangled; crossing is recommended only on trails, at clearings around the towers, and in a few areas mapped as white or light green.