Lake Herman Recreation Area
Date: (Sun.) Feb. 22, 2015
Location: Benicia, CA
Event Director: 
- 650.906.9672
Course Setter: Nick Corsano
Type: C; Regional event with four point-to-point courses; Junior Training event
Course Setter's Notes
By Nick Corsano
The Bay Area Orienteering Club welcomes you to our newest map, and our first event ever in Solano County. Five courses are being offered. The Green course is printed at 1:7500; all the others use a 1:5000 scale. The contour interval is 2.5 meters.
Course Length Climb Controls Technical Difficulty
White (beginner) 1.7 km 50 m 12 Easy
Yellow (adv. beginner) 2.4 km 90 m 14 A little harder
Orange (intermediate) 3.8 km 135 m 14 Moderate
Brown (advanced) 3.6 km 85 m 15 Moderately difficult
Green (advanced) 4.7 km 160 m 18 Moderately difficult
Important! Everybody must check in at the assembly area and download their E-stick, whether they finish their course or not. That's how we know you're not lost in the hills. Everybody must be back by 2:00 PM.
All the courses use the same Start and the same Finish, both very close to the assembly area. All courses share a common first control, a 200-meter run along a paved path. Orange, Brown, and Green each have water at one control.
There is one bit of uncertainty about the courses. A herd of goats has been grazing in the park for the last month or so (a fire suppression strategy). The presence of the herd might limit the route choice on one leg of one of the advanced courses. However, after talking to the goat herder Friday afternoon, it looks like we won't be in each other's way at all on Sunday.
Our assembly area is in Benicia Community Park, which features picnic areas, restrooms, a dog park, a skateboard park, a disc-golf course, and several baseball/softball/soccer fields. Lake Herman Recreation Area is an open space surrounding the community park in a rough semi-circle. High points offer panoramic views of Suisun Bay, Mount Diablo, and the Valero oil refinery. The lake itself is a small reservoir that provides drinking water to the city of Benicia. To protect the watershed, we have kept the courses a distance up from the lake and the lower creek beds.
The terrain is quite open and the hills are moderate by Bay Area standards. The rain early in the month and the goat-trimmed grass make the running very fast. As a result, Orange, Brown, and Green are both physically and technically on the easier side, so people who have been thinking of moving up a course might want to do it here. Advanced orienteers looking for a longer run should do Green first and then Orange as a second course.
While there are some wooded areas in the park, vegetation for the most part consists of bushes and small trees. These have been mapped in a variety of ways. Prominent isolated ones use the green dot symbol. Control descriptions use the thicket symbol unless the object is clearly a tree, and then the distinctive-tree symbol is used. Larger thickets are mapped as two-dimensional shapes. Where bushes cover a larger area, the vertical-green-line symbols are used. The wider-spaced lines imply that runners will be able to pass through with no more than minor deviations from an optimal route; where the narrowly spaced lines are used, runners may have to pick their way. Finally, even denser patches of vegetation are mapped in the light or medium green. When controls are placed on the edges of these area features, the vegetation-boundary control description symbol is used.
Both the black X and black O map symbols are used for man-made objects. The black X specifically is used for benches along the trails, barbecues, and the series of disc-golf targets that circle the community park. The black O represents various pieces of park infrastructure. Neither type of feature is used as a control location.
There is very little poison oak in the park, away from the creek beds (which we are avoiding). There are areas with star thistle, but it is completely non-threatening this time of year.
The park is likely to be fairly busy if the weather is good. Please be considerate of hikers, joggers, bicyclists, other park users, and of course, the goats.