2018 Joint North American and Canadian Championship Orienteering Meet in the Yukon’s Negative Terrain

Posted on September 8, 2018 by Richard H. McBee Jr.

The week of August 17 -24, 2018 was an amazing international competition for Orienteerers from North America and Canada to compete on some of the finest negative orienteering terrains in the world. To say the least, this is extremely challenging terrain to nagigate, especially when one considers that much of it is covered with aspen and black spruce trees which obscure vision for any long distance.

Here’s Jill with our Club Banner at the meet! (Cold? 100F in Hood River, OR, 50F in Whitehorse, Yukon!)

The terrain is classed as “negative” because it has numerous giant potholes which go down rather than up like knolls from the surrounding land which was leveled by ancient glaciers. In the picture below is an example showing a small hill or knoll about 15 meters high in the upper portion of the picture with the circular contour lines forming a hill. On the hill are several depressions which are shown as circles with the small hash mark pointing to the downward section.

Canadian Middle 001 (2)

Looking at the lower portion of the picture to the right of the “6” you can see a depression or deep glacial pothole in which the contours go downwards for about 15 meters below the surrounding land. Obviously, you want to run around these holes rather than waste energy trying to cross them since they often have deadfall in the bottom. Note how similar the two land forms look on the map, knoll and pothole, with the sole exception of the hashmarks on the pothole’s contours.

The full week’s schedule of events for the 700 plus participants can be seen at the NAOC/COC Schedule .

The Columbia River Orienteering Club (CROC) from the Portland, Oregon area was represented by 10 members of the organization. Here are 9 of the members all together! With your’s truely dead center. Left to Right we have Aandy, Tony, Jill, Rick. David, Julie, Debby and Ken in line with Virginia down in front. Yeah! Team!

IMG_3731(1)

Our 10th member was Alison Crocker who is on the US National Elite Women’s Orienteering Team. She didn’t get in the photos beacuse she had to compete and then get back home to her new baby! You can see the International Orientation Federation results for Alison Crocker, IOF Ranking for Alison Crocker here. Alison’s successes in the Middle and Long races for the elite women, helped push the US team results up enough to defeat the Canadians from retaining their long held ranking as the North American Champions. Yes! Our U.S. team got the silver cup!

CROC’s other medalling member was Virginia Church who won a gold and silver medal in the women’s age category of over 75 years of age. Well done Virginia! Here she is for the Silver presentation.

Great Orienteering and great fun although the courses were tough and you can see all of our results and the pictures of everyone here if you like. Pics and results

Enjoy!