SLOC Picnic at Laumeier

May 15, 2005

The SLOC picnic has been a bit of a wash the last few years. Two years ago, it was literally washed out by an absurdly strong thunderstorm. Last year, the publicity went out too late and not many people brought food. This year, everything went well and we had a really nice picnic on a beautiful day in a great park.

Competition map

Laumeier is a sculpture park. The park has a dense trail network connecting several dozen sculptures. Most of the sculptures are quite large and many are huge. The combination of the unusual features and contrasting vegetation (half fields, half thick woods) makes for a pretty unique orienteering experience.

The course was a 22-control Score-O set by Mark Geldemier. Although the only overall route decision was which direction to run the loop and which order to take 16 and 18, Mark did an excellent job of providing many route choice legs. Such legs are particularly hard to evaluate when you're punching a control every minute.

Eric won with a time of 22:19, with David coming in second at 23:18. Jeff got all but one control. Yvonne ran with her husband. After eating more chips and cookies than we probably should have, we all went over to the Meremac River and paddled for a couple hours.