Ultimate Orienteer #8: Ultra-Long

COURSE NOTES by Patrick Nuss

Salmon La Sac is beautiful, rugged, and navigationally complex. There are many reasons why this venue tops the scales at 10/10 in both of CascadeOC’s physical and navigational ratings! The terrain consists of open runnable forest, giant slabs of rock, thousands of knolls, boulders, and cliffs, and some thicker areas of vine maple, downfall, and logging debris. Salmon La Sac poses a significantly greater technical and physical challenge than an average orienteering meet on a college campus or in a city park.

I have designed five courses, three of which can be conveniently accessed from the parking/registration area. If you’ve never orienteered at Salmon La Sac before, I recommend that you arrive early and try several of the shorter courses. The Beginner, Intermediate, and Short Advanced courses are all about 3.5km in length and have very few checkpoints in common. They are good opportunities to test and improve your navigation skills before you “head up the mountain” and attempt a more rugged course in the future.

The remaining two courses, Advanced and Long Advanced, are very difficult, and require both a shuttle from the parking/registration area to the trailhead, and a 900m walk up the hill to a remote start. These courses get to the best stuff on the map! These courses finish at the parking/registration area, which means that there’s a mandatory 800m route along the road through the out-of-bounds area in the middle of the map.

The Beginner course is entirely on trails and roads. The Intermediate course will require basic contour reading, and will have most checkpoints within 100 meters of trails and roads. The three advanced courses (Short Advanced, Advanced, and Long Advanced) will be almost entirely off trail, requiring detailed contour reading, and precise navigation to point features.

All maps are 1:10000 scale with a contour interval of 5m. All maps will be printed on 8.5 x 11″ waterproof paper. The Advanced and Long Advanced courses will be printed on two sides of the same sheet of paper. Everything north of the out-of-bounds area is on Map 1, and everything south of the out-of-bounds is on Map 2. There’s overlap between the two maps, so it’s straightforward.

The Long Advanced course can shortcut to become the Advanced course. These two courses share the first 6, and the final 15 controls. If you want to shortcut while you’re out there, just skip from control #6 (1.6km into the course) to control #14 on the Long Advanced course to get the Advanced course. This is noted in the control descriptions.

Update: a HUGE tree just fell across a trail that all five courses use near the registration/parking area. It is possible to go underneath, but it’s a little annoying.

Water: There is no water available on the three shortest courses. There will be two water controls on the longest courses: one is 1.6km from the start (control #6 on both courses) and another just before the mandatory road run (3.7km from the start on Advanced, 7.4 km from the start on Long Advanced). There will be water at the parking/registration area. It is still advisable to carry water with you on the course, especially if it is hot!

Safety Bearings: If you need to exit to safety, there are two different safety bearings for the two areas of the map. If you’re north of the out-of-bounds, then you’ll want to head south/downstream to the road, which will get you to the road or trailhead. If you’re south of out-of-bounds, you’ll want to head west to the Cle Elum River Road. These are noted on the maps.

Terrain & Map: This map was originally made in 2009 and is in generally good shape. The most recently logged areas have grown somewhat in 7 years, so mapped areas of rough open land with scattered trees can seem more light green in reality. There is vine maple in the deeper reentrants, but courses are designed around the worst of it (and they don’t have thorns, so it’s not too unpleasant). A lot of the map has quite nice and runnable woods and moss-covered slabs of rock!

Speaking of rock, there’s a lot of it, in many different forms. Giant slabs of moss-covered rock are mapped as open land. There are thousands of boulders, cliffs, and rocky knolls, not all of which are mapped. Boulders smaller than 1m in height are usually not mapped. Some rocky slopes (some covered in moss, some not quite steep enough) are not mapped as cliffs, just as contour lines. I’ve used a lot of rock features as control location on the advanced courses.

Ultra-Long: For those of you competing in the Ultimate Orienteer Series, this is the Ultra-Long event. Those who study Orienteering USA regulations will know that Ultra-Long courses should be at 1:15000 scale and “feature long legs, and route choice legs” on terrain with “high route choice potential and/or good rough map reading”. Ultra-Long courses “may contain a variety of technical difficulties, but no controls should be set solely for technical challenge” and “excessively thick or stony areas should be avoided”.

Well, Salmon La Sac is not really suited for a by-the-book Ultra-Long! Salmon La Sac has a very high technical challenge with a lot of stony areas, and the size and steepness of the terrain doesn’t lend itself well to massively long legs. This is special terrain, and I wanted to play to its strengths, so advanced courses will have a lot of technical controls on point features. The Long Advanced course does have two 1km legs to give it a little Ultra Long feel.

This is my third time designing courses here, and it’s my favorite place to set. I hope you’ll enjoy running the courses as much as I had designing them!