Gunston Hall

Results are below and on Attackpoint. To enter your routes and see how others went, head to RouteGadget.

Next event: Saturday April 30 on the Granite area map of Patapsco Valley State Park.

A superb Washington-area spring day--sunny, mid-70s, low humidity--was the perfect environment for the inaugural orienteering event at Gunston Hall. Tom Strat finished off over a year of work to map the area by providing the club with a great set of courses that combined the open fields around the entrance road and the Hall itself with open, steep terrain in the very north and rather dense and challenging ground in the south. We had 200 orienteers go out on one or more of the courses with many first-timers among them. Additionally, many participants availed themselves of the opportunity to tour the Hall and learn a bit about one of the less well known of the Founding Fathers, George Mason.

And this event is only part of an ongoing expansion of areas available for orienteering use on Mason Neck. Tom Strat is continuing to map the area of the Gunston Hall property that lies west of Gunston Road and that abuts areas of Mason Neck State Park north of Kane's Creek. This work will open up a substantial tract of land for orienteering not previously mapped and to which we have not had viable access. So we have the exciting prospect of new areas on Mason Neck available for O-meets and the potential for combining sections of the various parks/properties in the area for orienteering purposes.

Returning the subject to yesterday's meet, and on behalf of all the event participants, I would like to thank the volunteers who put on the event: On registration, Rae Ann Hicks, Ben Bloschock, Bill Vienna, Gary Smith and Matt Holman; our trainers, Mark Hicks, Bill Wright, and Paul Hession; and gathering in the controls to finish up the event, John Organek, Kim Jepsen, Laura Holian, Aaron Linville, and Sidney Sachs. Thanks also to Jeremy Gillespie and the cadets (and QOC members) of the Loudon County High School NJROTC battalion, Nick Schaefer, Nate Rexroad, Shaw Smith, Ian Evans, Nathan Rodriguez, Tom Wetherell, Christian Tschida, Turner Leigh, and Brody Slusher. They did good work at registration, in managing parking issues, and in helping in the tear-down of the event. Rae Ann and Mark Hicks were also good enough to loan their tent shelters for club use during the event. And, of course, Valerie and Amy (aided by Sara Lemanski), who always get to the events early and leave late, once again made the set-up and execution of QOC's advanced e-punch operations and display capabilities look easy.

Thanks also to Gunston Hall's director, Scott Stroh and action officer for this event, Lacey Villiva, whose responsiveness and encouragement of orienteering at Gunston Hall greatly aided the planning and execution of the event. Lacey also successfully completed the yellow course. And in an unanticipated informal survey, the owner of zPizza and Quizno's reported that at least this time QOC orienteers seemed to favor Quizno's by a large margin for their post-event snacking - perhaps pizza is preferred when the weather is colder?

Finally, congratulations to QOC members Aaron Linville and Laura Holian who are getting married on May 1st.

-Charles Carrick, Event Director