Divine Lunacy

I spent several hours today setting an orienteering course up at camp Webster (a BSA camp). For those of you don’t know, an orienteering course is a finite set of [hidden] points (in 3-space) that persons, armed with maps and compasses work to find. (I’m sounding more mathematical every day.) In short, there are a bunch of points on a map, and corresponding markers out in the woods. Participants must find these markers using only a map and a compass. (i) In my many years of scouting, I have set up many orienteering courses, and completed even more than I’ve set up (in record time, of course). This was the first time I used a GPS while setting up the orienteering course (without forsaking the proven compass and map method.). I must say: Those things are pretty damned cool. I was able to mark each point on the orienteering course on the GPS, which allowed me to easily take back bearings to verify the results we obtained using our compasses.

Time to get into some theoretical leadership stuff about the human mind… If a person gives you peanut butter, jelly, knives and bread, you’ll probably make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich; if a person gives you a map and a compass, you’ll probably use them both to complete an orienteering course. In my years of orienteering, I have seen many people fall victim to the evils of compasses. Nothing against compasses, but who wants to take a bearing and pace 1500 paces on that bearing? When pacing such a long distance, the margin for error is very high, as I demonstrated today. Ok, so you can use a compass; I bet you feel special. I’ll beat you without one. If a marker is 1500 paces away, but right off a trail, don’t waste your time pacing that. Walk to the trail, then figure things out from there. This leads me to an interesting anecdote. There was no way I was going to walk 1500 paces and maintain a constant direction, so I let my father and company do that, while I walked my fat rear-end to the nearest trail (which isn’t on the map; I’m just that good.). I set one waypoint on my way, and beat them to the correct location by ten minutes. I actually had to go find them because they were 500+ feet off. Without further adieu, I give you the top x guidelines to better orienteering.

• If a marker is on top of a hill, walk to the top of the hill, don’t pace it, don’t take a bearing; use contour lines to your avail.
• Don’t shoot a 3000-foot bearing; you’ll just feel stupid when you’re 300 feet off of where you’re supposed to be. Use intermediate landmarks, such as hills and streams.
• Put down the compass, fool. You’re standing right next to the scream; the marker is right on the stream. I bet if you follow the stream, you’ll find the marker. (unless you just happened to find the wrong stream)
• If you’re looking for a marker at the convergence of two streams, find that point…
• Orient by inspection. If the road on your map is perpendicular to the roads real life location, you have a problem; parallel lines never cross. If the mess hall is on your left, it better be on your left…
• Use the force, Luke.
• back bearing = (heading + 180) mod 360; use it.

All that said, I think I’ll train an elite group of persons and call them ‘my’ orienteering team. With them, i shall claim first prize at the tournament that I have not officially created yet.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 12th, 2005 at 1921:04 and is filed under Scouting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.