The June long weekend saw SA orienteers, and a few interstate visitors, travel to the Flinders Ranges for 3 days of orienteering. The weekend commenced on Saturday afternoon with a warm-up event on Rawnsley Park station presented by the Southern Arrows. The area is a typical spur gully terrain with complex watercourses, native pines, open areas and rocky ridges.
Sunday moved to the Mannawarra – Prelina map, with a long OY event by OH and course planner Craig Colwell. The area is more subtle spur gully but with many small knolls, native pine cover and open hills, and many watercourses. The area offers fast running, but the opportunity to easily lose map contact as some orienteers found. Low cloud obscuring the distinctive hills early in the event added to the navigational challenge. Craig’s long courses offered a great mix of leg types, with some long legs (as on Course 2 below), combined with more technical sections with short legs especially near the end of the course requiring you to maintain concertation to the end.
The fast terrain was exemplified by Simon Uppill who completed the 15.5 km M21A course in 77 minutes, a running rate of 5 mins/km! Bridget Anderson was fasted on the W21A course – 12.6 km in 96:45 minutes.
Tyson Hillyard was the course planner for the WA Middle Distance event on the Monday. This was the northern part of the same map, with some overlap in area with the Sunday event allowing the use of the same finish area. The subtle terrain, with some complex areas again offered a technical challenge in the courses set by Tyson. The sun also appeared for the day, with Rawnsley Bluff being a backdrop the event.
All results are available on the Results page. Here you will also find links to Route Gadget where you can view all the courses, and to Winsplits to see where you and others may have made errors.
And don’t forget to vote for the Course Planner of the Year Award at the links here as well.
Below - some juniors enjoying the orienteering.
