The Event that Almost Never Was
I like Sutherland’s Grove. Yes, there are some horrendous bits of jungle, the river can only be crossed (orienteering-wise) at three points, many of us are on first name terms with some of the boulders and there is really only one feasible starting area. But there are some interesting parts, some unmapped.
So, for the last year or so, I have been adding to the map first drawn by Stirling Surveys and subsequently added to by Andy Dale and Ross Lilley (see later). The north east of the map contains some really nice little gems. I was therefore happy to plan another event in Barcaldine, especially with Andy as controller.
He reined in my early attempts to drown you or dash you to your death on the rocks of the gorge and, with a week to go, we had five interesting courses.
Four days to go and I dropped down the road to check a few things and tag control sites, to be confronted by warning signs and, worse, felling going on in the north east of the map. Aargh! Green and Blue lost the best bits and Light Green was also affected. I stood for a while and watched while my hours of apprentice mapping disappeared under a gigantic tree harvester. (The exposed contours are interesting, though.) So, instead of tagging controls I spent some time adding to the map south of the river.
Cancellation was considered, but we decided to drop Green and turn the truncated Blue into Green. A little tweak of Light Green was also necessary. Right, off we go, until …
Only thirteen pre-entries; is it worth the effort? An email to some committee members produced a 100% response in favour of going ahead (OK, two out of two); so most of the controls were put out on Friday. That took a little longer than I’d hoped as the map has “issues” in the block visited by the Green course (controls 2 and 3) and Light Green (3).
Saturday, then; off to put out final controls. Discovered I’d left my car door open all night and my wellies were sodden. However, the weather forecast is great. I put out the final controls without wearing waterproofs; mistake – it rained; and I fell over a root and tweaked a muscle. Why am I doing this?
Finally it’s time. The first four entrants were foreign (Fort William!) and in the end we had 26 competitors. No complaints and a good few “thank you”s. (Thank you, Claire). I might even consider doing it again.
Results are here…
My thanks to Andy for controlling and to Andy, Jessica and Briony for collecting controls, to Irene for taking entries and to Robert and Fiona for sorting stuff out afterwards.
An Interesting Aside
As you may know, I look after the extensive collection of maps EckO has. It is very instructive to follow the evolution of the Sutherland’s Grove map from 1997 produced by the Kilbowie Outdoor Centre, through the Stirling Surveys “path only” survey in 2006 and Andy Dale’s improvements in 2007 and an MTB version, to the current version, courtesy Andy, Ross and me.
Posted on 07th Nov 11
by Alan Partridge - Mapping Co-ordinator
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