Gateway Grunt Mapping Notes

Forest Park

Forest Park is an interesting mix of urban park and actual forest. The area used for the sprint has been completely remapped to ISSOM standards at 1:5000 with 2.5m contour. For those not familiar with sprint maps, this includes using the funky dashed "road" symbol for trails. In addition to gravel and dirt trails, Forest Park does have 9 miles of paved bike trails, so it's easy to get confused if you're not used to reading the sprint symbols. Any reasonably well-defined trail is mapped using the dashed road. The traditional trail symbol (which is in the ISSOM symbol set, but is to be used sparingly) is used for small trails that might be best described as "deer tracks". They are most prevelant in areas where the vegetation is thick, so despite their size, they come in handy.

The wooded areas are generally pretty thick. Light green is noticeably slower than white and less than half the speed of yellow (unless the ground is really soggy from snowmelt). Medium green is less than half the speed of white, which makes it about a quarter the speed of fields and trails. Don't even consider the dark green.

Most water features in this part of the park are natural and easily crossed. There are some man-made streams and ponds mapped with uncrossable bank lines. These are not to be crossed, no matter how confident you are that you could do so.

There are quite a few small drainage ditches feeding the streams. These are typically lined with rock. They have been mapped as cairns, even though they are less than a meter high, because they look like rock piles from more than a few meters away.

Manmade features vary from items as pedestrian as transformer boxes to a large tree entirely plated in aluminum. What you can count on is that it's highly visible, obviously man-made, and considerably larger than any unmapped manmade object in the immediate vicinity.

Functioning water fountains are mapped with the blue "O" symbol. Feel free to use them as water stops. Keep in mind that most of them have freeze-free valves, so it might take a few seconds for any water to come out.

Hawn State Park

Hawn represents the pinnacle of ridge and valley terrain. The ridges come in all shapes and sizes and are cut by complex reentrant systems. Rock features are abundant, predominantly in the form of limestone outcrops. The trail network is moderately dense, but the woods are so fast there isn't much need to use them. Visibility is generally excellent.

Since this park was re-mapped by Zoran Krivokapic in 2002, we've had approximately 1000 competitive starts on this map, including two A-meets. I've only heard one person ever complain about the map (more on that in a bit). Thus, my primary goal in updating the map was to "do no harm." As there have been no significant earthmoving activities in the last decade, I didn't even consider adjusting the contours or rock features. Since we are using both the old and new maps for the Grunt, I tried to adopt Zoran's interpretation of all other features. This resulted in updates only to trails, vegetation, and water features.

The greatest need was trails as these have been extensively re-routed. Fortunately, this is one of the easier things to get agreement on. The only subjective decision was what to do with the original trails, which are quite prominent, but getting a bit overgrown. Aside from having to hop over a fallen tree here and there, these are still pretty runnable. I decided to downgrade them to small trails except in cases where they really are becoming indistinct. In a few cases, they are distinct, but not runnable. In those few cases, I mapped them as dry ditches (Zoran also did this with a few trails that had been rerouted in the 90's). There are also a fair number of legitimate small trails on the map. Generally speaking, the big, overgrown trails are pretty straight and run along the tops of the ridges. Small trails winding along the sides of ridges are currently in use.

Vegetation was a bit tougher. I don't think Zoran's standard for light and medium green is wrong, but it's not what we generally use. That, and the fact that there is one rather inconsistent area in the southern part of the map (not used for this meet, but the source of the aforementioned complaint), makes it a little difficult to reverse-engineer Zoran's interpretation. Simply put, there is no distinction between the blazing fast, wide-open woods and the still pretty fast woods that would be mapped white just about anywhere else. I would normally map the latter as light green simply to highlight how incredibly fast most of the forest is.

That said, in early March, you can run full speed through all of the white and most of the light green as well. Visibility is somewhat less in the light green. Medium and dark green are varying densities of scrub oak. Dark green really is nasty - don't go there.

The two densities of vertical slash are roughly equivalent to light and medium green in terms of speed, but visibility is much better. Hawn suffered much less storm damage last spring than most neighboring areas, but there are still quite a few newly fallen trees. Some of them are really big. The visibility is good enough that choosing a line around them is pretty easy, so I didn't map them except in areas where there are enough of them that you have to either go around the whole area or climb through them. In those spots, I used the tight vertical slash.

Water features required only minor updates. To preserve consistency with the older map, I maintained Zoran's odd practice of using linear marsh where most mappers would put an intermittent stream. Again, it's not wrong, just different from what I would do.

Hawn Sprint

The area at Hawn for the Team Fundraiser sprint has been mapped to ISSOM standards at 1:5000 with 2.5m contours. In general, the mapping is not much different from the 1:10 map used for the Middle.

The biggest difference is the mapping of deadfall. Because even a few seconds can be critical in a sprint, individual downed trees are mapped (green X) if you can't go strait over them without slowing down. There are smaller downed trees that are not mapped, so using the green X's for navigation is probably a bit dicey. There are much easier features to navigate from. Downed trees are only mapped in the white woods; you are already assumed to be taking a speed penalty in light or medium green.

As with Forest Park, the dashed road symbol is used for all but the smallest trails. The ride symbol (long narrow dash) is used in to denote an overgrown jeep track. It is very distinct, but no faster than running through the woods.