Course Setter: Mark Voit
Blue — 12.89 km — 357 m — 25 controls Red — 9.49 km — 306 m — 19 controls Green X — 6.57 km — 237 m — 14 controls Green Y — 5.33 km — 162 m — 12 controls Brown — 4.44 km — 135 m — 11 controls Orange — 4.30 km — 132 m — 13 controls Yellow — 3.08 km — 66 m — 8 controls White — 2.36 km — 48 m — 10 controls
Green X: M-18, M50+, M55+, M60+, M Green
Green Y: F-20, F35+, F40+, F45+, F50+, F Green
No description sheets will be provided in advance; they will be handed out two minutes before the start, as required by the IOF Rules for the WRE. We implement this procedure for all categories on all days. The size of the control description box for these handouts is 5 mm, so that the Blue description sheet, for example, is 125 mm (4.9") long by 40 mm (1.6") wide.
Parking: In the main parking lot for the beach at Pontiac Lake. Each car will need to pay the $6 Michigan State Parks one-day park pass fee upon entering, so please carpool. Meet headquarters will be the pavilion at the west side of the parking lot.
Walk to start: About 1200 meters. Follow the streamers starting at the southwest corner of the parking lot. After the road crossing, competitors must stay to the south and west of the trail to start, in order to remain out of the competition area.
One of the classic challenges of Michigan orienteering is distinguishing up from down on the map. You will have plenty of opportunity to practice that skill at Pontiac Lake. There are many areas of intricate contour detail, with numerous small depressions and hills, and we have set the courses to take advantage of them. The map itself is optimized for that kind of terrain—all courses will be on maps with a scale of 1:10,000 with 3 meter contour intervals. We experimented with reducing the scale to 1:15,000 but parts of it then became too difficult to read.
You will need to keep in mind that Pontiac Lake is an aging map. It dates from 1994, and the vegetation in some locations has changed in the meantime. We have tried to update the vegetation mapping in key places where the changes are critical to route choice. Most of those changes are near the finish. All courses will cross some rough open fields near the end, and the vegetation mapping in those areas is rather generalized. However, the courses have been set so that navigation through those areas should not depend on detailed reading of the vegetation. Elsewhere you may find that areas mapped as white have occasional thick or thorny patches of undergrowth. These areas are annoying but generally passable or avoidable without too much reduction in speed. Our advice here is to base your micro route choice decisions on your eyes and not the map.
The trail network at Pontiac Lake is somewhat irregular and convoluted because certain segments of older trails are in various stages of being reclaimed as forest land. These reclamation projects make trail navigation quite tricky in a few spots. You might have to look carefully to find some of the trail junctions.
Be aware that there is a major mountain-bike trail that winds clockwise around the whole map. If the weather is good, you are likely to encounter mountain bikers. You might also encounter horses on some trails. We are generally avoiding the stable area, but if you do see horses, please give them some space, so as not to endanger their riders. Most runners will not encounter cars, but competitors on Red and Blue will have one road crossing with a small amount of traffic going to and from the campground in the middle of the park.
Water features are generally on the full side, as usual for Michigan in April and May. However, crossing any water feature marked as crossable should not be a problem. The main effect of the extra water is that vague, flat marshy regions may be larger than mapped.
There are not many rock features. The most common are rockpiles, and not all of them are mapped. Generally the larger rockpiles are marked on the map and smaller ones in their vicinity are not. Many of the mapped ones are not very high, sometimes less than 0.5 meters, but they do contain plenty of rocks. A few boulders are also marked, but they are so rare here in Michigan that most isolated boulders bigger than about 0.5 meters show up on the map.
One of the controls on Blue is a black ×. This is a 1 meter high hunter's blind made of tree branches.
Some unusual non-IOF symbols have been used on the map. Sparse black dotted lines indicate subtle transitions in the vegetation. In some cases they are old farm-field boundaries. You may also see black fence lines with large black ×'s, representing barbed wire.
Finishing times for the winners are likely to be a bit on the long side, because the white woods is slower than we anticipated during the winter. Expect winning times of around 95 minutes on Blue, 80 minutes on Red, and 60 minutes on Green. Note that there are two Green courses on Sunday, so please make sure you take the correct map at start.
The finish area is ideal for spectators, so please stick around to cheer on your fellow orienteers. Pontiac Lake is a great area for orienteering, and all finishers will deserve applause!
Created: 01 May 2007
Last updated: 07 May 2007
Vladimir Gusiatnikov