What is Orienteering?
The aim in orienteering is to navigate around a course with a series of checkpoints called controls. The course is marked on a map provided by the organisers. The controls are placed on features such as track and creek junctions, a fence bend or by a distinctive boulder. With he site being marked with an orange and white flag which has a hole punch attached to mark your card. to show you have been there.
The skill in orienteering is in choosing the best route between controls — while beginners' courses may not offer choice,but as you progress up in the levels you will learn to decide between options — perhaps over a hill or a longer route which goes round it.
Orienteering is a Sport for All
Orienteering events provide a range of courses to cater for all participants. With the courses being graded by age, length and by the amount of navigation required.
There are shorter courses aimed at the beginners and also for younger people; these follow "handrail features" (tracks, creeks, fences) through to more advanced courses catering for the more experienced which have more using more contour features.
Orienteering provides a special environment, in that the same event caters for all ages, for social and recreational participants as well as the more competitive, for families who can all go to the same event. If you want you can do the course in pairs or in a small group. A special attraction is that every course is different.
What do you need to start Orienteering?
Clothing well you can wear jeans or tracksuit pants with a T-shirt and pair of runners (remember to bring a change of clothes as well as a bottle of drink and a snack),orienteering maps,
Orienteering maps are made specially for bush navigation and show much more detail than most other maps. Long blue lines across the map with arrowheads show the direction of magnetic north. A scale bar shows the scale of the map — usually, 1 cm equals 150 metres (1:15,000) or 1 cm equals 100 metres (1:10,000).
Different types of features have characteristic coloured symbols as follows:
* vegetation — white is for average forest, while green patches are for thicker bush which will impede progress, and yellow areas are for open land;
* water features — are marked in blue and these could include creeks even if then are dry;
* earth features — are marked in brown and they include contour lines which show the shape of the land, and other things such as earth walls and termite mounds;
* roads, rocks and man-made features — any mapped rocks and all man-made features (roads, tracks, fences, powerlines, buildings, etc) are all marked as black.