[roc-info] Meet notes for Ellison Park orienteering event this Thursday, Aug. 10

[Richard Detwiler]

Ellison Park, Thursday, August 10. The start is at Roadside Shelter, on 
the north side of Blossom Road.

There will be a White course, which you can start any time between 6:00 
and 6:45 (course closes at 7:30). The White course is on trails and 
fields, and offers relatively simple navigation, while exploring some 
nice areas of the park. One of the trails is narrow with vegetation 
encroaching on both sides. The vegetation doesn’t appear to contain 
poison ivy, or “prickers”. However, wearing long pants as opposed to 
shorts is recommended.

Also offered is a Score-O with a mass start at 6:30 pm, where the object 
is to score as many points as possible by visiting controls within the 
one-hour time limit.

Controls are worth 1, 2, or 3 points each. The point value is shown on 
the control description sheet, included on the map. All seven of the 
controls south of Blossom Road are worth 3 points each. This is to 
encourage more people to visit this nice area of the park, which has 
relatively few park visitors compared to the more well-known park of the 
park north of Blossom Road or the ball fields and shelters immediately 
south of Blossom Road.

The one and two point controls are all north of Blossom Road – there are 
11 one-point controls and six two-point controls. If you do the math, 
you can see that this works out to be 7 controls worth 21 points south 
of Blossom, compared to 17 controls worth a total of 23 points north of 
Blossom.

Nearly all of the controls north of Blossom are on fairly flat terrain – 
the extreme hilly area (NW of the dog park and NE of Irondequoit Creek) 
was completely avoided for this meet. The only exception is that there 
are two controls placed in the hilly area in the NE part of the park.

Since it’s starting to get dark early (and it gets darker a lot earlier 
in the woods than in open areas), for safety reasons, we do want 
everyone back on time, by 7:30 pm. To encourage everyone to be back on 
time, there will be a sizable penalty of 3 points per minute or fraction 
of a minute late. The penalty will start at 7:30, so if you’re late in 
starting out on the Score-O for any reason, you still need to be back by 
7:30. My suggestion is to head for the further-out controls (like the 
high-point ones south of Blossom) first. Then there will be a fair 
number of controls to knock off in the general area of the start/finish, 
so you can bail out whenever you need to in order to not be late.

The map of Ellison has never been perfect, and still is far from perfect 
even though a couple of edits were made for this meet. In particular, 
the vegetation south of Blossom is hardly mapped at all, except for open 
fields. The rest of the map (other than the open field areas) south of 
Blossom is mostly shown as white, even though many areas are not open 
woods. However, the interesting hilly areas between Irondequoit Creek 
and Penfield Road, where the controls are, are probably 90% either white 
or light green. Controls are placed so they can be reached with minimal 
unpleasant vegetation to work through.

The waterways mapped with solid black borders (mainly Irondequoit Creek) 
are forbidden to cross except by using bridges. Courses are set so there 
should be no real advantage to wading across anyway.