Townsend State Forest Results

Event Director: Ian Smith
Course Setter: Pete Bundschuh
October 28, 2012

Townsend State Forest is one of the more interesting maps and terrain in the NEOC domain, and unfortunately, it hadn't been used in some time. About 75 orienteers made the journey into the wood starting at the south edge of the map. Parking isn't as conveniently located as other locations; the Townsend Public Library graciously let us use their parking lot, and competitors walked about 1 km to the start. Pete Bundschuh, primarily of UNO, designed excellent courses making good use of the terrain. The southern end of the map is somewhat overgrown with mountain laurel, which dissuaded a few competitors, but the middle of the map on the longer courses has some magnificent and detailed running.

While hanging controls near the north side of the map, one of our course setters stumbled upon a handful of black bears moving en masse. Fortunately, the bears wandered away without incident. It turned out that they did discover a water control over night; they destroyed the jugs of water that Pete had set in the woods, bent the stand, and tore a hole in one of the flags.

Thanks very much to all the volunteers: Pete Bundschuh for designing the courses, to James Tasker for hanging controls on Saturday, and to Magnus Bjorkman for picking them up on Sunday after the meet. Help during the event was provided by the meet workers Michelle and Garrett Faucher, Pelle Wåhlström, Jeff Schapiro, Linc Berkley, and Dean Sturtevant. Jim Crawford was invaluable bringing all the equipment and rushing home to retrieve the computer when it turned out it was missing, and Aims Coney and Michelle Faucher made the parking-to-meet-site walk functional.

Pete designed a full set of courses - white through blue. In a surprising turn of events, no one ran the white course. Perhaps combining the white and yellow courses is viable, though it's nice to have a second course accessible to enthusiastic beginners who are ready for another exercise after completing the white course.

Yellow  2.5k 25m

Orange 

Brown  3.1k 45m

Green  4.4k 70m

Red  5.3k 90m

Blue  7.5k 175m