Morgan Territory Regional Preserve
Date: (Sun.) Oct. 27, 2013
Location: Livermore, CA
Event Director: 
- 505.310.8645
Course Setters: Dan Greene, Bjorn Widerstrom
Type: B; Full-featured 7-course event (Note date changed from original announcement)
Course Setters' Notes
By Dan Greene and Bjorn Widerstrom
We hope you enjoy the courses!
Courses
Here are the course statistics:
Course Length Climb Controls
White 1.8 km 40 m 2.2% 14 Yellow 2.6 km 85 m 3.3% 11 Orange 4.5 km 185 m 4.1% 12 Brown 3.1 km 145 m 4.7% 11 Green 4.5 km 245 m 5.4% 18 Red 5.5 km 310 m 5.6% 24 Blue 6.4 km 355 m 5.6% 27
Course lengths are calculated as the straight-line distance. Climb is calculated for a plausible route.
There will be controls with water on the Orange and advanced courses, and at the Starts and Finish. The forecast is for Sunday to be warm: consider carrying water, too. There's also a faucet in the registration area, and even a horse trough!
Comments about specific courses are below.
White Course (Easy Beginner)
The White course is the easiest course, and is recommended for beginners. It will follow trails. The navigation will require making the correct turns at the trail junctions. It is a good opportunity to learn all the symbols and mapping conventions of an Orienteering map, but it will only require being able to read and follow the roads and trails on the map.
Note that between controls 6 and 7 a faint unmapped trail splits off to the right. Stay left. We plan to hang streamers to mark the correct route.
Yellow Course (Beginner)
The Yellow course is also a beginner course. The route will follow roads, trails, and similar linear features (like fences and streams). Unlike the White course, the controls on Yellow will be slightly off the road or trail, and less visible, so it will be possible to walk past a control if you are not navigating correctly.
The Yellow course is a good opportunity to learn to read the contour lines on the map. These lines represent the shapes of the hills and valleys and can be very helpful for navigation; however, since the course follows linear features, reading contours is not necessary to complete the Yellow course.
Orange Course (Intermediate)
For the Orange course you will need to use advanced navigation skills (e.g., taking a bearing, attack points, aiming off—if you have any questions, ask an advanced orienteer to describe these skills). However, control sites have been chosen to make it easier to execute these skills, and the control sites are near enough to roads and trails for you to relocate and make another attempt to find a control. The Orange course is well designed for those just starting to learn advanced navigation.
Brown, Green, Red, Blue Courses (Advanced)
Morgan Territory has complex rock features that should make the navigation very challenging. However, the courses have less climb than most Bay Area terrain, and they are slightly shorter than classic distance, so we are expecting very fast winning times from those who can avoid getting lost in all the rocks. The best times will result from carefully judging the navigational challenge, as it varies throughout your course, and running fast when it’s warranted and navigating carefully when that’s warranted.
Mapping Notes
Rock Features
Even experienced orienteers will benefit from reviewing IOF mapping conventions before orienteering in Morgan Territory:
- A small black dot corresponds to a boulder, 1 m or larger, that is distinct in the field.
- An area of black non-equilateral triangles corresponds to an area with so many blocks of stone that they cannot be shown individually. (Some of the blocks might be larger than 1 m; they are just too close together to map.)
- A black equilateral triangle corresponds to a small distinct group of boulders that cannot be mapped individually.
In is important to realize that you will see a lot of boulders that are not mapped: boulders less than 1 m might appear distinct in the field, but are not mapped at all because they are too small, and very large boulders might be mapped as part of a boulder field, because they are too close together to be mapped individually.
The Morgan Territory map follows IOF mapping conventions for rock features reasonably well.
Note that the symbols used for boulders in control descriptions might be confusing. When a rock feature is used as a control, the control descriptions (which are printed in black) cannot use the obvious choice of a black dot for a boulder, because a black dot in a control description corresponds to a brown dot knoll on the map. Instead, a triangle in the control description means a black dot (distinct boulder) on the map. Two triangles in the control description means a single triangle (boulder cluster) on the map.
Vegetation
The Manzanita might not appear dense it the field, but it is often mapped with a darker shade of green on the map, because of its difficulty of passage.
Vegetation over much of the open land has been cropped short by cattle. Shaded areas have undergrowth up to about knee high, with some stickery seeds. There are very few thorns.
Dead Trees
Because of the age of the map, there are more dead trees than shown (green ×). Moreover, some of the downed trees shown on the map have nearly disappeared from the field. Amusingly, some of the trees previously shown as dead turn out to be living. We fixed the map where we noticed, but we didn’t attempt a full survey: don’t pin your navigation decisions to green ×s.
Trails
Several narrow trails have formed that are not shown on the map. Some are bike trails parallel to the main trails, but there are some new game/cattle trails that could potentially cause confusion away from the main trails.
Trees
Live lone trees are mapped with either a green circle or a patch of white. If the lone tree is well separated from its neighbors it will usually be mapped as a green circle. If several lone trees are close enough together that their green circles would nearly touch each other on the map, the mapper has shown this with white; sometimes a small white patch might represent as few as two lone trees. This can be confusing when you are trying to match lone trees in the terrain to green circles on the map. In the control descriptions, a lone-tree symbol is used when there is a green circle on the map, while a forest-corner symbol is used when there is white on the map.
Water
Stream beds are dry; ponds are pretty much dry too.