Course Setter’s Notes
By Gavin Wyatt-Mair
Welcome to picturesque Lake Herman at Benicia Community Park. The area is great for picnics, so hang around with your friends and your family and enjoy the park as well as the orienteering challenge.
Lake Herman Recreation Area is an open, runnable, mainly grassy park with rolling hills dotted with thickets and bushes. The spring grass is getting long, has no stickers yet, and the footing is good. Advanced-course runners should wear studded shoes to accommodate the hill slopes. The ground is quite soft after the winter rains and spring drizzles. The weather forecast is nice — partly cloudy and dry, 60–65°F. The courses are fast, with ample route choices, and the need for careful navigation. The conditions for orienteering will be just about perfect!
Courses
For extra, super fun, the Silver, Brown, Green, and Red courses are all subsets of the Blue course. This was achieved using a Loop concept, sometimes known as a “Butterfly”, in which the courses return multiple times to a central, “spectator” control. Each Loop has a different length and difficulty, and visits a different area of the park. Note that the common control will be visited a lot because the loops overlap, so don’t be confused by runners going all over the place, and do check your control codes! Be sure to upload your routes to RouteGadget afterwards for some interesting analysis!
The Start and Finish are very close to registration.
Here are the course details:
Technical Physical
Course Length Climb Controls Loops Difficulty Difficulty
White 2.2 km 40 m 13 n/a Easy Easy
Yellow 2.4 km 65 m 12 n/a Easy Easy
Orange 4.0 km 155 m 17 n/a Moderate Moderate
Silver 3.1 km 60 m 18 2 Advanced Moderate
Brown 3.9 km 135 m 21 2 Advanced Moderate
Green 5.0 km 145 m 27 3 Advanced Hardish
Red 6.2 km 230 m 28 3 Advanced Hard
Blue 7.3 km 245 m 34 4 Advanced Harder
Beginners should be aware that the lengths shown are the cumulative straight-line distances between controls. The climb numbers represent the amount of ascending that would be done on the "optimum route" (i.e., in the Course Setter's opinion), without regard for any descending. Because you won't travel in straight lines, and might not follow the optimum routes, your actual distance and climb will be somewhat more than what is shown above, and will depend on your route choices (and any errors you make).
All the courses are standard, point-to-point courses, which means the controls must be visited in the order shown on the map.
If you plan to do the Blue course, note that it has 33 controls. Thus, you must use an E-punch with enough capacity. E-punch serial numbers with fewer than seven digits, or seven digits with "2" as the first digit, will not have enough capacity. You can rent a punch with enough capacity if necessary.
The Map
The map scale is 1:5000, with 2.5 m contours.
The map was originally drawn by in 2014 Emile Radtke for her Girl Scout Silver Award project. It was updated to the ISSprOM standard¹ and georeferenced with LIDAR by Matej Šebo in 2023.
Dark-green areas are typically impassable blackberries. The green-dot ● and green-area symbols have been used extensively to map bushes and thickets. These features are not all of similar size across the map. In some cases, a dot can be a single bush perhaps 4 feet high and 3-foot radius, whereas in other cases the dot can be a single thicket perhaps 10 feet high and 15-foot radius.
You’ll see some disc-golf targets on all the courses — none of these are mapped. There are also white, post-like structures in the terrain that appear to be birdhouses — only a few of these are mapped.
Safety
Poison oak on the courses is minimal and easily avoided. There are ticks.
There will be water only at the common, spectator control on the advanced courses. Apart from that, there is no water on the courses — please carry your own if you think you want some!
Caution
There are baseball/soccer/volleyball fields on the courses. Please do not cut through ongoing games.
¹ Information about mapping standards is here.