okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Friday, January 03, 2003
D is for dunes
D is for dunes. Sand dunes that is. Sand dune terrain makes for some challenging orienteering.
One of the more interesting places I've orienteered in the U.S. is a place called Mission Hill on the upper peninsula of Michigan. The area is a big forested sand dune. Take a look at a scanned copy of the map with my routes on a red course.
The challenge at Mission Hill was staying found. Relocating was difficult. I ran there a long time ago. I think it was 1984. If I remember correctly, it was easy to run too fast, lose contact with the map, miss a control, then take a long time to figure out where you where.
Minnesota has some mapped sand dune terrain. They've used Sand Dunes State Forest for at least one A-meet. A few years ago, Mary and I ran on one of the maps. In places the area was nice, but in some places the forest was filled with thorns and dense saplings. Here is a scanned copy of the map from the Minnesota O' Club's home page.
As far as I know, the Michigan and Minnesota areas are the only dune terrains used for A-meets in the U.S.
OK has a small black and white map of a sand dune area in the middle of Kansas near Hutchinson.
I've been interested in exploring the sand dune terrain in the middle of Nebraska. Here is a topographic map of a bit of the forest. It looks interesting.
