okansas.blogspot.com

okansas.blogspot.com
Occassional thoughts about orienteering

Saturday, November 08, 2003

Bad terrain

I spent 90 minutes today running around on one of our local orienteering maps and it struck me -- we've got some really bad O' terrain. The woods are thick. But, the woods aren't just thick, they are also full of thorns. Navigating is not very interesting. We don't have complicated fine orienteering or difficult route choice.

Here are a couple of maps that show the typical terrain around Kansas City: Prairie Center and Woodridge. Both of these places are ok, but just sort of boring and not especially nice. Both maps look more interesting than they are.

So, the terrain around here kind of sucks. But there must be some advantages to having crap terrain. What are the advantages?

1. Everywhere you travel seems nice (even Texas!).

2. You probably develop some mental toughness from running in thick and thorny forests.

On the bright side, we do have a couple of really nice areas...well, maybe not a couple, but Knob Noster is nice. And we have orienteering. Lots of places in the U.S. don't. I'm sure there are lots of places in the U.S. that have fabulous orienteering terrain, but no orienteers. I'd rather have races in crap terrain than no races. I'm also sure there is worse O' terrain (places around Tucson look pretty horrific, though some of the terrain is quite nice).

Still, looking at some of the maps from races I've traveled to over the years and maps in O-Sport make me envious.

posted by Michael | 4:27 PM

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