Calero County Park¹
Date: (Sun.) Sep. 23, 2012
Location: San Jose, CA
Event Director: 
- 650.281.5280
Course Setters: Dan Greene, Kent Ohlund, Sean Campbell
Type: B; Classic orienteering in one of our classic parks -- standard 7 courses, beginner through advanced
Event Director's and Course Setters' Notes
By and
Welcome to the Bay Area Orienteering Club's annual event at beautiful Calero Park, part of the Santa Clara County Parks system. This year's event has the standard set of 7 courses (White through Blue):
Course Distance Climb Navigation Terrain
White 2.8 km 140 m Beginner, Trails, Fence Easy Yellow 2.6 km 140 m Adv. Beginner, Trails, Fence Easy Orange 4.2 km 195 m Intermediate, Off-trail Moderate Brown 3.1 km 165 m Advanced, Off-trail Moderate Green 4.0 km 225 m Advanced, Off-trail Hard Red 5.9 km 345 m Advanced, Off-trail Very Hard Blue 7.5 km 485 m Advanced, Off-trail Extremely Hard
Participants should consult the individual course notes below before choosing a course.
Schedule
Course participants should expect the usual schedule for local events. That is, registration from 9:30 AM — noon, starts from 10:00 AM — 12:30 PM, beginner's clinics from 9:30 AM — 10:30 AM. Courses close at 2:00 PM.
Important: Please remember that courses close at 2:00 PM. And, even if you don't complete your course, please be sure to check-in at the Finish and download your E-punch so that we know you have returned and do not initiate a search for you.
Location/Driving
Calero County Park is located south of San Jose. See the event announcement for map and directions
Registration and E-punch will be at the edge of the parking lot — we’ll be hard to miss.
Start and Finish Location
The Start is a 25-minute walk (1.1 km, 100 m climb) up the trail from the parking lot. Follow the orange flagging beside the trail. The Finish is back near registration. You will pass near the Finish (about 100 meters to your left) as you walk to the Start.
E-punch
All the courses will be using electronic punching. If you do not already own an E-punch stick, you can rent one at registration. Please remember to check-in at the E-punch station near registration before you go to the Start, and also remember to download your E-punch stick after you return from your course. (Please download and return your rented E-stick even if you do not complete your course. This will help us determine that everyone has finished.)
Refreshments
We will have a refreshments table near the registration and E-punch tables, so plan to stick around and socialize after finishing your course. It’s a great opportunity to compare your strategy and results with other orienteers.
Warnings
With the dry weather, the matted grasses and loose soils can be slippery.
Please be careful. We recommend O-shoes or cleats on the intermediate and advanced courses, and shoes with good traction for the White and Yellow courses.
There is a moderate amount of poison oak in the park. It is very dry this time of year, which will reduce the risk of getting an allergic reaction, but without leaves poison oak can be hard to identify. If you have doubts, we recommend that you wash with something like Tecnu after the event.
Course Notes
White Course
The White course is the easiest course, and is recommended for beginners. It will follow trails, with the exception of one section that follows an obvious large linear fence. The navigation will require making the correct turns at the trail junctions and at the fence. 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, trails, and fences on the map.
Yellow Course
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.
All Advanced Courses
Calero is very hilly and the course climb statistics at Calero are high. We’ve taken advantage of the hills to create some interesting route choice legs. We’ve compensated for the climb by reducing the distance significantly on the Brown and Green courses. Red and Blue are significantly longer, but they have some flatter sections that should be very fast. All the advanced courses will demand good navigational judgment — knowing when to go fast and when to be careful.
Mapping Notes
The Calero map has an unusually large contour interval, 25 feet, which is approximately 7.5 meters. (You are likely more used to 5-meter contours.)
The water levels are very low, so the edges of the water features are not very accurate.
Most of Calero was carefully remapped in 2006, with a large amount of accurate vegetation detail. The map is still very accurate, but has aged slightly since then. Most obviously, some of the down trees have decayed to the point where they might not now be mapped, although they are usually still visible. Also, we have not managed to map all the newly fallen trees.
The "newer" 2006 map follows IOF mapping standards with the exception of Zoron's innovative green-T symbol to mark fallen trees. The symbol is oriented to point the direction of the fallen tree trunk. You will find this useful in identifying down trees. Note that the green-T symbol is fixed size, thus it indicates only the direction of the trunk, not its length. If the down tree does not have an obvious linear extent, a green X is used instead. On the control description these down dead trees appear as a lone tree modified by the "ruined" symbol.
Only down dead trees with distinctive "roots in the air" use the rootstock control description.
Standing stumps also use the lone-tree control description with the "ruined" modifier. On the "newer" 2006 portion of the map they are mapped with a green X.
The Orange, Red, and Blue courses will visit an older portion of the map (on the northern most portion of their map). In this older part of the map a fallen tree showing roots in the air is mapped as a brown X. A fallen tree without visible roots, or a standing dead tree, is mapped as a green X. Many of these have deteriorated with time and may no longer be large enough to warrant being mapped.
Live lone trees are mapped with either a green O or a patch of white. If the lone tree is well separated from its neighbors it is usually mapped as a green O. If several lone trees are close enough together that their green O’s would nearly touch each other on the map, then the mapper has shown this with white; sometimes a small white patch may 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 O on the map, while a forest-corner symbol is used when there is white on the map.
We hope you enjoy the courses!
Your event organizers,
Steve Haas, Dan Greene, Kent Ohlund, and Sean Campbell