okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
watching wildlife and finding controls
Mary and I spent some time in Yellowstone about this time last year. One of the highlights of a visit to Yellowstone is the chance to watch the wildlife.
A lot of Yellowstone's wildlife is very easy to spot, like the Bison below.
But other animals, like wolves and big horn sheep, are harder to catch sight of. In the weeks before our trip, I made a point of training my eye to spot animal movement. To do that, I tried to spot as many birds as possible when I drove to work and walked from my parking space to my office. With just a little training, you become much more aware of the birds, which I figured was similar to spotting wildlife.
I was thinking of this when I read Aspleaf's blog today. He wrote about an training exercise that, among other things, trains the orienteer to spot control flags.
Put out about 30 controls in the box. The runners run around the area, checking out all of the potential control points until they've found a certain number of controls. It trains you to read the map carefully and to look around and spot the markers.
Just like my exercise to spot the birds.
posted by Michael |
7:43 PM
