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Great Brook Farm, Carlisle MA
September 17, 2016
Meet Director: Kelly Guarino

It was a gloriously sunny, early-fall Saturday at Great Brook Farm State Park, and a great day for orienteering. The fields and open trails got a bit hot, but since we had started with a cold morning, the woods stayed fairly cool.

This venue tends to draw many newcomers and groups, and that was true this year. We had many families with kids, couples, buddies, and groups of friends. We also had 2 troops of Boy Scouts, one participant brought a group of co-workers, and I got to see some Carlisle friends who were trying orienteering for the first time. We did a lot of instruction, and it was great to see so many people learning about orienteering. A number of competitors with beginner-level experience decided to try moving up a level and took on Yellow and Orange courses. Maybe this was why the Orange course had both the most starts and the most DNFs. Kudos to the two girls who took on an Orange course on their own, and came in smiling after three hours.

We had 72 starts (about 100 people) spread out fairly evenly among all the courses. In addition, a revised String-O course, which stayed on the grass behind the barn, had 5 enthusiastic participants. The courses were straightforward for the Great Brook map. White, Yellow and Brown stayed north of the Meadow Pond complex, and the others routed just south of it (without going south into Tophet Swamp). The Stone Row/Indian Hill area in the north of the map got mixed reactions - those that picked up the enlarged map insert for that area perhaps liked it better. Some light-green areas on the eastern side of the map have had enough die-off that the area is okay for running. On the other hand, some areas in the south marked as white were a bit overgrown. Control #144 (Green #16, Red #21) was universally hated by everyone, for being overgrown and difficult to locate.

With so many orienteering regulars out of town for the U.S. Classics Champs, we were worried that we might be short on volunteers, but that was not at all the case. Thank you to everyone who helped!!

Tim Booth and Pete Frykman took care of the day of meet computer/results, and Tim also set up the course files ahead of the meet and posted the results online. Faye Doria, Bud O'Leary, Dorina Nimigean, Michael Cooper and Richard Powers all helped with set-up, registration, instruction, and String-O setup. In addition to helping with all of that, Bud O'Leary also took care of all of the food and drink, and is one of the most organized volunteers I have met. Bob Dangel and Gary Gallagher picked up controls, as did Paul Regan, who jumped in to help when he heard me talking about prioritizing control pickup. Many of the above and some others (sorry, I didn't get names) helped take down equipment and pack it in my car.

A special thank you to Tim Parson for being the shadow Meet Director, answering all of my questions and taking care of a bunch of the pre-event details, and also to Gary Gallagher, who took on vetting all of the control locations, putting out most of the controls, and reminding me a number of times that anyone who was likely to complain was going to be out of town.

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