Kings Mountain National Military Park

Report from the Meet Director – Walter Siegenthaler

What a beautiful day, nothing but sunshine and comfortable temperatures. This was the last time running the event on the existing map that was made by Georgy Kuntsevitch, a mapper from Russia, more than twenty years ago. The interesting part of this map is that Georgy made this map without the use of a base map which means he started out with a blank piece of paper and drew every contour line and everything else that is on the map. Amazing that we were able to use this map for such a long time.  Yes, we have made some updates whenever we found something that was not mapped right or had changed. Unfortunately, Georgy passed away way too young due to cancer.

As we were orienteering out in the park, Bob Burg, a mapper from New Jersey, was driving south to start field checking for the new map. This time the piece of paper he is taking out into the woods has a lot of information on it already. The contours were generated from LiDAR data (laser data collected from an airplane flying over the terrain). I’m looking forward to setting courses next year with the new map in hand.

The week before the event we ran into problems with the online reservation for pre-printed maps (sorry for the inconvenience), so my e-mail inbox started filling up with notes about the problem and orders for maps. After all was done – we broke a record for the most number of reserved pre-printed maps, I had reservations for 113 pre-printed maps! It looks like everybody likes the convenience of bypassing the copy tables and I think it makes the process flow better. Keep in mind that the reservation for pre-printed maps closes on Wednesday evening before an event in order to allow for the printing of the maps and transferring them to the meet director.

Unfortunately, there were still some participants who did not check in with the time keepers when they came off the course. This causes unnecessary worries for us organizers, not knowing if we have to start a search party. PLEASE CHECK IN WITH THE TIME KEEPERS, IF YOU FINISH THE COURSE OR NOT!

A big thank you to my wife Lissa and our friends Philip and Bruce for handling the start and finish. And thank you to James Sisk and Rick Vogel and his boys for helping to pick up controls.