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Urban Festival of Orienteering

Date: Aug. 4 - 6, 2006
Location: Oakland and San Francisco, CA
Event Director: - 510.681.6181
Course Setters: Rex Winterbottom, Dwight Freund, Vladimir Gusiatnikov, Joe Scarborough
Type: C; Four events in three days

Event Write-Up

By Rex Winterbottom

Thanks to everybody for helping make the Urban Fantasy of Orienteering into the Urban Festival of Orienteering. While this has long been a fantasy of mine, could you believe that talk began about it only at the Tahoe 2-Day A-meet six weeks ago, and a week later we put it on the calendar? A fun weekend was had with plenty of interesting orienteering challenges in both urban and forested environments, with some fun socials as well. This was the prototype of what could become bigger and better. With more lead time, we could get it on people's calendars earlier, make it a B rather than a C event, and provide all the refinements allowed by "advance planning." Considering the short time frame, and the void in our schedule between the Tahoe 2-Day, Bayfront Park, and U.C. Berkeley, I'm happy that our club could team up to provide three days of four fun events, with 3 USOF Sprint Series sprints, a "Maze-O" style Score-O, an Urban Goat, and White, Yellow, Orange, Brown, and Green courses.

The following people were critical in the planning and execution of the event:

  1. Brad Wetmore took a crash course on insurance certificates, played the point on the Joaquin Miller preregistration crisis, and arrived early at Golden Gate and Joaquin Miller to help get things in order.</le>
  2. Bob Cooley had a lot of maps to do and helped me get the courses on Condes since I don't have a computer compatible with the program.
  3. Ev and Jean Beuerman handled all registration duties for the entire weekend and kept track of all the preregistration bookkeeping.
  4. Dwight Freund, Vladimir Gusiatnikov, and Joe Scarborough provided excellent courses.
  5. Andrejus Masalkovas and Jim Fish arrived early and stayed late for most of the events, providing a lot of support.

A few stalwart orienteers managed to make all three days of events! And all of them were involved in helping as well. These participants combine to make the official Urban Festival of Orienteering All-Star Team:

  1. Clare Durand — all the way from Los Angeles!
  2. Andrejus Masalkovas
  3. Jim Fish
  4. Mattias Eriksson
  5. Bob Cooley
  6. The Konkov-Doubson family: Fyodor, Natasha, Masha, Julia

Thanks go to all who participated and helped. By being there, you made the festival. I hope we can enjoy future versions of this kind of multi-day event in the years to come and attract people from both inside and outside the club to attend.