Andrew and I planned months in advance to head down to Arizona for the Mogollon Rim Rogaine on May 16-17, as it was the only 24 hour event in the Western US this season. It turned out conveniently to be the "national championships" as well. For those not in the know, a "rogaine" is a 24 hour score-O event (score-O means orienteering in which you can visit checkpoints in any order, checkpoints have different point values, and whomever collects the most points and gets back to start within time allowed wins).
We arrived on Friday afternoon to the start location. Elevation was 7000 feet, temperatures were mid 80s during the day, 50 at night, with fairly clear skies. The terrain was mostly open forest with many washes, draws and gullies. We organized all of our food and gear by Friday evening. I weighed out Andrew's food with a postal scale so that he wouldn't bring too much food like last time. We also decided to come back to the Hash House (the start/end point - they also served food during the race here) just before dark if we could so that we could leave half of our food as well as our heavyish night gear, which included Andrews 500 lumen mountain bike light. We planned to light the place up at night.
They handed out maps at 9am, two hours before race start, and we sat down to plan our route. We decided to visit the northwest section of the map first, which had fewer terrain features, and I planned out a 6-8 hour loop. At night, we planned to head west and follow a series of draws to visit several of the checkpoints in that direction. Ideally, these would be reasonably easy to follow at night.
We were a bit rusty at the start, but picked up momentum as we went. We briefly stopped at a smallish gully looking for the first CP, but it was further on in a larger reentrant. We took a little while to match what we saw in the terrain with the size of things on the map. We also used thumb compasses for the first time, and although they took some getting used to, we really enjoyed navigating with thumb compasses rather than our sighting compasses.
We really tripped up at CP 91. At the previous CP, I suggested heading down the reentrant that we were in to the draw at the bottom then navigating from there. I didn't realize that there was an intersection before that, so we started navigating from the wrong point, and didn't really recover. We wasted 45 minutes and ended up bailing on CP 91 in order to find ourselves on the map again. 90 points was a lot to leave on the table, but we were anxious to put it behind us. From then on, our navigation was spot on, and we cruised into the Hash House at 6:40pm to grab a sandwich and our night lights. I decided to forgo long pants, although
I did bring a windshirt/hat/gloves for the night in case we got cold and lost somewhere.
We headed west for a counterclockwise loop of the points out there. Everything was working for us navigationally, but we got slower and slower as we tired. During the 3-5am timeframe, we got really sloppy and stupid. Because we were tired, we followed an unmarked road for a while instead of a ridgeline, and then could not accurately place ourselves on the map for about half an hour while we looked for the CP. Then the on the next CP we thought we had overshot it before we arrived to the CP, and then I started reading my compass wrong, as I was looking for a NW gully instead of a NE gully. Andrew set me straight and we regrouped to come back and nail it, just as the sun was coming up. We started shortening our route a bit here in order to finish on time, and we finished our shortened route with 40 minutes to spare.
We finished with 2420 points. The winners had 2760,2750 and 2740, so we were 350 point off the winning score. While this was not completely out of our reach, we would have had to hit the 90 point CP that we skipped and then move a fair bit faster than we did so that we could have made up about two hours or so. We were 5th overall, which was respectable.
Summary: We did fairly well as far as bearings and pace counting except for the hours just before dawn. Our route choice seemed very good and we could have executed it if we were a little faster. My Salomon shoes withstood the beating - Andrew had a lot of foot pain in his Cascadias after 24 hours. Andrew stopped eating around midnight and suffered for it a few hours later. I brought just the right amount of food (after augmenting with a
sandwich at the hash house), although the trail bar I had at the end was hard to eat and I would have rather had cookies. We ran out of water in the morning and suffered a little bit at the end. We could have easily stopped at a water stop that was on our original plan and probably gained 40 points on our current score, at the expense of an extra half an hour of time, putting us in much closer to the 24 hour cutoff. We started a little slow, but as we get more rogaine experience, I think that we will be able to correlate the size of the features we expect to see with the map immediately rather than after one or two trial-and-error checkpoints. I also need a little more practice with my thumb compass as I was getting confused several times in the wee hours of the morning.
We arrived on Friday afternoon to the start location. Elevation was 7000 feet, temperatures were mid 80s during the day, 50 at night, with fairly clear skies. The terrain was mostly open forest with many washes, draws and gullies. We organized all of our food and gear by Friday evening. I weighed out Andrew's food with a postal scale so that he wouldn't bring too much food like last time. We also decided to come back to the Hash House (the start/end point - they also served food during the race here) just before dark if we could so that we could leave half of our food as well as our heavyish night gear, which included Andrews 500 lumen mountain bike light. We planned to light the place up at night.They handed out maps at 9am, two hours before race start, and we sat down to plan our route. We decided to visit the northwest section of the map first, which had fewer terrain features, and I planned out a 6-8 hour loop. At night, we planned to head west and follow a series of draws to visit several of the checkpoints in that direction. Ideally, these would be reasonably easy to follow at night.
We were a bit rusty at the start, but picked up momentum as we went. We briefly stopped at a smallish gully looking for the first CP, but it was further on in a larger reentrant. We took a little while to match what we saw in the terrain with the size of things on the map. We also used thumb compasses for the first time, and although they took some getting used to, we really enjoyed navigating with thumb compasses rather than our sighting compasses.
We really tripped up at CP 91. At the previous CP, I suggested heading down the reentrant that we were in to the draw at the bottom then navigating from there. I didn't realize that there was an intersection before that, so we started navigating from the wrong point, and didn't really recover. We wasted 45 minutes and ended up bailing on CP 91 in order to find ourselves on the map again. 90 points was a lot to leave on the table, but we were anxious to put it behind us. From then on, our navigation was spot on, and we cruised into the Hash House at 6:40pm to grab a sandwich and our night lights. I decided to forgo long pants, although
I did bring a windshirt/hat/gloves for the night in case we got cold and lost somewhere.We headed west for a counterclockwise loop of the points out there. Everything was working for us navigationally, but we got slower and slower as we tired. During the 3-5am timeframe, we got really sloppy and stupid. Because we were tired, we followed an unmarked road for a while instead of a ridgeline, and then could not accurately place ourselves on the map for about half an hour while we looked for the CP. Then the on the next CP we thought we had overshot it before we arrived to the CP, and then I started reading my compass wrong, as I was looking for a NW gully instead of a NE gully. Andrew set me straight and we regrouped to come back and nail it, just as the sun was coming up. We started shortening our route a bit here in order to finish on time, and we finished our shortened route with 40 minutes to spare.
We finished with 2420 points. The winners had 2760,2750 and 2740, so we were 350 point off the winning score. While this was not completely out of our reach, we would have had to hit the 90 point CP that we skipped and then move a fair bit faster than we did so that we could have made up about two hours or so. We were 5th overall, which was respectable.
Summary: We did fairly well as far as bearings and pace counting except for the hours just before dawn. Our route choice seemed very good and we could have executed it if we were a little faster. My Salomon shoes withstood the beating - Andrew had a lot of foot pain in his Cascadias after 24 hours. Andrew stopped eating around midnight and suffered for it a few hours later. I brought just the right amount of food (after augmenting with a
sandwich at the hash house), although the trail bar I had at the end was hard to eat and I would have rather had cookies. We ran out of water in the morning and suffered a little bit at the end. We could have easily stopped at a water stop that was on our original plan and probably gained 40 points on our current score, at the expense of an extra half an hour of time, putting us in much closer to the 24 hour cutoff. We started a little slow, but as we get more rogaine experience, I think that we will be able to correlate the size of the features we expect to see with the map immediately rather than after one or two trial-and-error checkpoints. I also need a little more practice with my thumb compass as I was getting confused several times in the wee hours of the morning.
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