2005 North American Rogaining Championships
Playing Together
Shawn Wenger / 11.08.2005
Last year it was STORMY Â Squamish Test of Running Metal, Yeah! Â a 67 km trail run covering almost 5000 vertical feet following the same trail as the
Squamish Test of Metal mountain bike race.
This year my husband, Chris, and I have started the race season with the North American Rogaining Championships, a 24 hour orienteering event in the
Hat Creek Valley, north of Cache Creek.
ROGAINE Â Rugged Outdoor Group Activity Involving Navigation and Endurance.
Friends and co-workers think we¹re complete nutbars for doing this stuff, but there are people just as crazy out there who thought this up to begin with! All kidding aside, the race on August 2 and 3 was an amazing event put on by
the Kamloops Sage Orienteering Club. Organizers spent weeks in the Hat Creek Valley setting out controls and water drops and planning the logistics behind this large scale event.
Teams received their maps at 8 am Tuesday morning and had four hours to plan their routes before the 24 hour clock began ticking. The map had 60 controls marked throughout a 160 square kilometre area, covering both sides of the Hat Creek Valley, ranging from 850 to 1750 metres elevation. Each control had a corresponding short description like \"NW edge of small clearing\" or
\"top of hill.\" The challenge for each team was to plan a route that would enable them to collect as many controls as possible within the 24 hour period. Each control was worth between 20-100 points, depending on how difficult it was to find and get to.
Chris and I spent the morning in the camper drawing pencil lines on the planning map, filling water bladders, erasing and re-drawing possible routes on the map, organizing food, preparing our feet, duct-taping our socks to ward off spear grass and discussing strategy.
As it turned out, our brilliant plan to give up seven of the possible 60 controls was a little on the optimistic side. Having run 67 km in 8.5 hours
last year, we were a little off-base with our calculations on how quickly we could cover ground in dense undergrowth and fallen trees, not to mention how terrain changes after dark.
In our training hikes we have managed to cover on average four to five kilometres per hour, so to be reduced to two, three and sometimes one when
we were searching for an elusive control in a tricky location was a bit demoralizing.
It didn¹t take long after our mass start with 59 other teams, 141 total competitors from 9 different countries including Denmark, Estonia, Finland and Bangleadesh, at noon for us to realize we weren¹t going to collect quite
as many controls as we had hoped.
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