Greenbelt

(updates: in blue) Welcome back to Greenbelt! We’ve been unable to use Greenbelt Park for several years, for various reasons. Finally, we will be able to run here again! And, even better, the woods seem to be a little nicer than you remember them (or, perhaps I just set awesome courses that avoid the worst areas. Or maybe a little of both). Ted Good has started updating the map, but he hasn’t finished up yet. So the map doesn’t always reflect the more open nature of the woods. I found that the light green and even most middle green was runnable, but I suggest you avoid the dark green “fight.” Areas with vertical green have lower vegetation, sometimes thorny; the wider-spaced green slash I found to be not too bad. You’ll still encounter thorns (nothing like Hoyles Mill though!), but usually the patches are either small or easy to get around. The white woods are generally very nice, and I’ve tried to take advantage of those relatively small areas of open forest. Ted has been taking old rootstocks off the map, and only the bigger/newer ones remain.

As a close-in, well-used park, there are lots of trails. You are likely to come across dog walkers, hikers, and runners on any given trail, so please be careful and courteous. There is one trail that is closed, with caution tape across it at both ends; the bridge on that trail is unusable. The trail is marked with magenta X’s on all courses; please stay off that trail. Crossing the trail is OK.

All courses except the White cross the road that bisects the park and encircles the main parking areas, sometimes several times. Although it isn’t a busy road, you definitely want to check carefully before crossing. Yellow crosses at trail/road crossings only. White crosses a blocked-off access road to a parking lot, and the parking lot itself. There should be no traffic there.

I tried to set the longer courses to have controls and routes through the nicest areas of the park, and to include a longer route-choice leg. You will likely be running on a trail and/or the road for parts of these longer legs, so the course lengths shouldn’t worry you: there will be a fair amount of non-woods running.

The longer courses will run through the campground in the southern part of the park. There aren’t any campers there right now, Part of the campground is open and may have some campers, and you may see a sign that says the road is closed not only to vehicles but also pedestrians. You can safely ignore that sign.

The Blue course has three controls in an un-fieldchecked area. The map is based on lidar and perhaps satellite imagery; I found it to be good enough to use for controls, but remember that vegetation isn’t mapped here (what is shown is from lidar/imagery) and there may be some smaller features missing.

With a lot of rain up to and perhaps on event day, the creeks may be harder to cross than usual, and there definitely will be mud. The trails will be muddy as well. Use caution when crossing any creek (most courses have bridge options; Blue has one double creek crossing that as of Thursday was still easy to cross on a log and a short hop. If that changes, Blue runners will probably get wet(ter).

Some controls are very close together; a White control and an Orange control are especially close. Always check the codes!

Course map scales are likely to be 1:7500 for White, Yellow, Beige and Brown courses and 1:10000 for all other courses.