“Corona†training courses in Danville
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Sycamore Valley Regional Open Space Preserve
Dates: May 4, 2020 to ??
Location: Danville, CA
Course Setter: 
Type: Training; Two streamered courses for practice/exercise during the shutdown
Related Information
February 28, 2021 Update
- This course is considered to be "closed".
General Notes
- These are training courses, not an organized BAOC event. We do not have a park permit for these courses.
- Be careful for your safety. You are on your own—tell somebody where you will be and when you expect to return.
- You are doing this at your own risk. Each participant assumes full responsibility (BAOC accepts no responsibility) for any and all injuries, losses, and damages that he or she incurs while attending or participating in these courses.
- Be mindful of the general COVID-19 restrictions, and any specific restrictions that might apply to the park.
Description of Courses
More do-it-yourself Pink Streamer training courses, this time at Sycamore Valley Regional Open Space Preserve (https://www.ebparks.org/parks/sycamore/default.htm) in Danville.
Course details:
Course Length Climb Controls
Short 2.3 km 140 m 6
Medium 3.8 km 240 m 8
Map scale 1:10000, with 5 m contours.
Read the course notes, download the PDF map, get travel directions, and see photos of the park and the control locations here: Sugarloaf Training Course (https://sites.google.com/view/terraloco-training/2020-05-03-sycamore-valley-north). You can also report your results on that webpage.
As mentioned on that webpage, the trailhead is at 37.809916,-121.940757.
Enjoy before it gets too hot. Or go early or late!
The grass is way better than Sugarloaf (Thanks, cows.), but long pants are recommended.
Enjoy!
(May 4, 2020)
Course Comments
I recommend you visit Sycamore Valley soon, if you are planning to do so at all. The recent rains have made the footing quite good, and the stickers not so stickery. My shoes were caked with mud when I finished, but not so thickly as to be noticeable when I was on the course.
The first two controls on the Medium course are mostly a physical slog, so do the Short course if you don't want that. But from control #3 on, I found the course to be an enjoyable exercise in reading the detailed LIDAR contours, in which every little reentrant in the terrain is going to be shown on the map. Quite the change from Las Trampas, where a significant amount of contour detail is completely hidden.
I was surprised by how much the terrain has changed since Rex took his photos. The grass all looks so green and lush in the pictures, but it has just about all turned brown now.
Thanks once again to Rex for setting up all of this!
Steve Gregg
(May 12, 2020)
RouteGadget
The Sycamore Valley “Corona†training course is now on RouteGadget. Visit RouteGadget for an introduction or go directly here (http://baoc.org/gadget/cgi/reitti.cgi) to draw your route.
Since there was no E-punch, I set up the event using the "no results" mode, which requires a bit more effort to enter your route.
Drawing Your Route Manually
You need to enter your name, total time, and optionally any cumulative splits that you might have taken. Both splits and total time need to be in MMMSS format. For example, 0:57 is entered as "57", 5 min 43 sec as "543", and 1:12:32 as "7232". That's easy.
Uploading Your GPS Track
You need to enter only your name (please include your time after your name)—total time and splits are not required as with manual entry.
Since there are no E-punch splits, it's very challenging for RouteGadget to fit GPS tracks to the course automatically, especially as our maps are not georeferenced. Thus, you will need to adjust your track manually more than usual.
When you upload your GPS track, there are three blue adjustment points that you can move to adjust your track. There are typically points at the start and finish of the track, and a third one somewhere in the middle of the track.
The trick is to add more blue adjustment points by right-clicking the track anywhere you would like to add a new point. I typically add a blue dot at every control location on my track, as those are easy to identify because of the notable direction change. Then I drag the blue dots to the corresponding control locations on the course. Note that you can remove a blue dot by right-clicking on it.
To see other RouteGadget events worldwide, visit http://www.routegadget.net (http://www.routegadget.net).
Happy Routes,
(May 21, 2020)
Status Update
I've discovered that for some reason when you Publish a Sheet with Google, it defaults to “only those who you’ve shared it with.†So I had to go through another step to fix the “results†page for this event. You should now be able to see what happened, with stats and GPS tracks, here (https://sites.google.com/view/terraloco-training/2020-05-03-sycamore-valley-north).
No one has said any streamers were missing.
(May 22, 2020)