Cunningham Falls

This event will take place on a new LiDAR-derived map of a portion of Cunningham Falls State Park covering a large part of the east-facing side of Bob's Hill, adjacent to the park's Manor Area parking on the west side of Route 15 and the Catoctin Furnace, on the east side. The map scale will be 1:10,000; the contour interval 5 meters. The map is a slightly improved basemap - trails and a certain number of point features, mostly boulders and rootstocks, encountered during scouting and course setting were surveyed by GPS and added to the LiDAR-derived features - so it's fortunate that the LiDAR data is of high quality. In addition to producing reliable contours, it shows the plentiful charcoal platforms - which used to supply the Catoctin Furnace - ditches, slopes steep enough to possibly justify mapping as cliffs, and areas with significant mountain laurel quite well. The mountain laurel in the area the courses visit is generally runnable at reduced speed and with lessened visibility; the surrounding white woods are runnable though there is more deadfall and small rock underfoot than on most QOC maps, so don't expect to move quite as quickly through them as you often can.

The terrain, consisting as it does of a single large hillside with relatively few handrails, will challenge orienteers' distance estimation and compass skills more than typical QOC spur and reentrant terrain. Though a sufficiently skilled orienteer could manage without a compass - despite the paucity of other handrails, there will never be any difficulty distinguishing which directions are up and down on the map or in the terrain.

The most widely distributed kind of point feature in the terrain, if not necessarily the most common given there are some pockets of intense rock detail, are charcoal burning platforms. Because they show up so beautifully in the LiDAR data and were therefore the great majority of features on the base map, all the controls will be hung on them. Charcoal platforms will be familiar to many QOC members from visits to French Creek State Park and other areas in Pennsylvania where they're plentiful. For anyone lacking such experience, the brown triangles on the map mark the locations of eerily flat, more or less perfectly circular patches of ground on the order of 10 to 20m in diameter scattered throughout the park. Since the terrain is one big, usually moderately to very steep hillside, these flat circular areas stand out like sore thumbs when viewed from above. From below, they tend to be somewhat less obvious, although the built-up edge of the circle on the downslope side generally protrudes above the natural curve of the hillside in a way that an alert orienteer can distinguish from below. If you are new to charcoal platforms, there will be a few of them visible on the walk to the start for you to examine before running your course.

The courses on offer all have a common start and first few legs before the shorter courses take shortcuts at one point or another to rejoin the blue course, so people you see in the woods are likely to be heading to the same place you are (except occasionally when they're not) and it will be generally advisable to space starts out a bit, or at least let the faster orienteer start first. Note that in order to keep the climb on course manageable, there will be a 1.4km hike to the start from registration, with 200m of continuous climb en route. Please plan the timing of your arrival in the park and departure for the start accordingly.

Should you become lost and unable to relocate while doing your course, please return to the event center at the Manor Area by either (a) heading south until you reach the trail you hiked on to get to the start, then taking that trail downhill to the event center OR (b) heading downhill (more or less east) until you reach a divided highway (MD route 15) then turning right (more or less south by southwest) and walking alongside it until you reach the Manor Area entrance.