Lake Needwood

Course results can be seen below as well as on Attackpoint or Winsplits. To enter your routes and see how others went, head to RouteGadget.

QOC members and guests awoke to the best weather of the spring season on April 9th and came out in big numbers to enjoy the challenges of Russ Damtoft’s impressively designed Lake Needwood courses. 59 controls! That has to be some sort of a record for a local meet. We had 147 starts and gave close to 200 people the wonderful opportunity to enjoy our sport at its finest.
You can’t process 200 people and 59 controls without a lot of topnotch volunteers stepping in to help out, so kudos and thanks to all who helped. They include:

• Russ Damtoft for spending many hours in the woods devising methods to get us lost.
• Nadim Ahmed who made the map that Russ used so effectively.
• Tom Nolan for helping to set the courses that Russ designed.
• Greg Lennon for helping to set the last few controls the morning of the event.
• Sean Fish, Erin Bzymek, Ben Roberts, and Daniel Heimgartner for processing all of the people who were so anxious to get into the woods.
• Kathleen & Greg Lennon, who sent all the first timers out onto the trail with just enough knowledge that they could find their way back again, and without so much that they felt overwhelmed.
• Amy Louden and her crew, which included Michael Wood, Allison Brown and John Vincent, did their usual great job at the e-punch station, and their leader Valerie Meyer stayed up late printing maps when she should have been packing for her trip to New Zealand.

And at the end of the day when everyone was exhausted and ready to collapse in a heap, there were still 59 controls that had to be retrieved from the woods. We had a large and efficient team of our most experienced orienteers volunteer to help with that massive job. They included: Jon Torrance, Kim and Anne Jepsen, Michael Dickey, Frantisek Brabec, Chris Gross, Eugene Tcipnjatov, Tom Smerling and Eva Mateeva, who didn’t even run a course, but came to help with control pick up anyway. That is the kind of dedication that helps to make QOC the best orienteering club in the US.
Finally, thanks to my wife Sarah for setting up our HQ, buying all the snacks, helping with registration and making sure I kept somewhat organized.
-Don Fish, Event Director