Old School Navigating aka Orienteering  

Posted by GeocacheGeek in , , ,

This past Saturday LittleTurtleMan and I attended the November meeting of the Georgia Geocachers Association at Oconee Veterans Memorial Park in Watkinsville, Georgia. The event was organized by Geomuse and Railroading and our guest presenter was Kevin Haywood, VP of the Georgia Orienteering Club. Kevin set up a 9 stop Orienteering Course for us to run using old school Map & Compass skills. No Coords, No GPS, just good old map and compass.
The course consisted of 9 stops. Each had a marker bag with a custom hole punch that puts pinholes in a pattern unique to each marker. The goal was to be the fastest person/team to hit all 9 markers and punch their map in the designated punch section (seen down the right side of the map in the image). Two of the markers (138 and 139) were mystery markers that you had to figure out their location based on their map coords listed next to their name.
This event brought back many memories of my time in the scouts and camping with friends and family. Getting the ol compass out and showing LittleTurtleMan how to use it was a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Before the event we hit some local caches at Butler's Crossing and also hit a few afterwards with some friends.
It never hurts to learn how to navigate and do things the old fashioned way because you never know when your GPS will die and leave you out in the middle of nowhere.

Be Prepared.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 10:51 PM and is filed under , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments feed .

0 comments

Post a Comment