WOC 2007, Kyiv

Thursday 18th, Long Distance Training, Пуща-Водиця by Mark Nixon

Terrain

The area was entirely pine plantation. The light green area, which covered most of the map, were areas of bushy undergrowth rather than thicker trees. In the white runability was good to excellent sub 5min/k’s. Visibility was ok. In light green areas runability was generally average, however there were patches of thick undergrowth which slowed the going. Visibility was very poor in these areas. There were literally some felled areas, these were very sandy, running was tough.

The geology of the area is sand deposits, giving very subtle and slight changes in relief. There are many large depressions and small hills. The hills aren’t very large (20m max), steep or detailed. They are obvious.

The area was 100% dry apart from the reservoir. This has been artificially created in a very steep sided river gorge, much like on the WOC Long final area.

As a plantation the area has a large overlying grid network of tracks and rides, these are often sandy. There are also many smaller paths throughout the area, but many of these disappear in the summer undergrowth.

There are many artificial pits in the area. Some of these are on the map.

Map, this was 4 years out of date and several new felled areas had appeared. The contours were well mapped. There were numerous pits not on the map despite being just as large and obvious as ones that were in the same area.

Orienteering

In the white open forest this was relatively simple, go straight, look up, use map-to-ground, and have an image of the control site.

In the green forest one has to adopt a far more cautious technique due to low visibility.

Attack points, get as close to the control as you can on a definable attack point, you can’t head into a block of wood hoping to pick your location up as you go.

Compass & Distance, its very important to be able to run very straight on a compass, keeping some form of distance judgement is also important so if you miss you know roughly when to stop and start searching.

Straight vs Round, even in the green the running wasn’t too slow, however the risk was high of getting pushed offline. We were unable to establish an accurate round to straight ratio.

WOC relevance
This area is quite similar to the flatter north/western part of the long final area.

posted by daniel @ 2:42 pm