2025-26 Winter League #1 – Magnuson Park

COURSE NOTES

Welcome to the opening event of the 2025–26 Winter League season! We are back at Magnuson Park. The park is a flat and relatively fast venue with complex navigation in areas of dense features. Terrain includes open grasslands, restoration zones, wooded sections, and wetland boundaries. Main trails are relatively accurate, but as always, trail visibility varies, especially in grassy areas, and expect some indistinct paths and unmapped trails. Courses will have a “long sprint” feel, generally somewhat shorter and with more controls, since this is the first event of the season, with an added twist for the advanced courses (see below).

· Expect uneven footing across grassy areas; watch for chuckholes and dips. Marsh and pond edges can shift depending on rainfall.

· As always, all magenta cross-hatched or olive-green areas are strictly out of bounds. One trail section has been marked entirely out-of-bounds with cross-hatching for safety reasons, and the southern “Ponds” area remains heavily protected as usual. Only advanced courses need go near these areas.

· There are a few downed trees near trails. Where relevant, they are marked on the map with a non-standard map symbol for a root stock with a down tree trunk, a brown T-shaped symbol. In one case, several downed trees block a trail; this is marked on the map with the above symbol. Most optimal routes avoid this trail, though it is passable, but notably slower, for advanced orienteers.

· Most courses avoid road crossings, including parking lots, with the exception of advanced courses, who have a brief road crossing. Exercise caution.

· All courses could encounter other public visitors to the park, in trail, playground, or sporting areas. Please run with caution, pay attention, and be good ambassadors for Cascade!

Butterfly loops (advanced courses only)

· Short and Long Advanced courses (including Varsity Intercollegiate) include butterfly loops, in which two or more independent loops radiate from a common hub control. Runners punch a hub control, complete one loop of controls, return to the hub, run a second loop, then return a final time to the hub before moving on.

· In the example below, the hub is the control marked on the map as 2/5/8, because it serves as control 2, 5, and 8. A runner comes to the hub from control 1, and punches the hub (2). Then the runner does the first loop (3 and 4); then returns to punch the hub (5); does the second loop (6 and 7); then returns a final time to the hub (8). Then they exit the area, continuing to 9 and the rest of the course. Runners punch the hub each time.

· Only the advanced courses will have butterfly loops. Each of the two advanced courses has a different hub control.

· While butterfly loops are often used to reduce following (by giving different runners different loop order), in this case, there is no forking and we have designed the loops to maximize map readability over pure route design as such. But we have included them here simply to increase variety and complexity (and fun!) at pace.