Orienteering:
Candidate for the Dumbest Sport Award

by Robert Miller

In most sports when the Gods are kind the competitors smile and thank Lady Luck. Not in orienteering. Orienteerers see red if they feel luck has had a hand in their success. The international rules state explicitly that orienteering courses shall be designed to test the skill of the competitor, not their luck. We don't even know who to blame for the existence of such a dumb sport. The Norwegians and Swedes both claim to have founded orienteering -- the fine art of getting lost.

Every two to four weeks 50 to 200 orienteerers gather in the Greater Seattle area with the purpose of getting lost or at least mildly disoriented, so they can enjoy the pleasure of getting unlost - a purpose not unlike banging one's head against the wall to enjoy the pleasure of stopping. Armed with map and compass they set out to find a dozen or so way points in the woods. A bit like a road rally on foot. The way points are selected physical features of the area such as boulders, hill tops, trail junctions, fences, power poles, sometimes even single trees. Because one tree can look pretty much like the next (to the uninitiated), the course designer hangs an orange and white marker near the feature so the competitor knows they have found the precise spot.

Orienteering maps are like U.S. Geodetic Survey maps done for the Sesame Street crowd. No magnetic corrections to calculate. The north lines on orienteering maps are useless for finding anything practical such as the nearest shopping mall, or exotic such as Nome, Alaska. That's because they don't point north. Not true north anyway. They point instead to a bleak, windswept point in Canada's Arctic islands - the magnetic north pole. And yes, they do map the occasional single tree along with some other physical terrain features your government surveyor wouldn't waste time mapping such as rootstocks, stumps, fire hydrants and boulders. And some features whose names would perplex Ranger Rick such as copse (a small group of trees), reentrant (a valley) and spur (a ridge).

In addition to using a map more detailed than Hansel and Gretel need to find their way home, orienteerers use compasses that have no degree markings or compass rose. They only care where magnetic north is. (Remember those bleak islands?) Armed with that knowledge they can orient (thus the name of the sport) their map to align it with the lay of the land. Then instead of heading to the nearest Pub or Bakery, they dash off into the woods in search of a one-foot square, three-sided, orange and white marker. At which point they are immediately rewarded for their efforts, not with anything as tasty as an Easter egg or as glittering as a pot at rainbow's end, instead they get to punch a hole in a card they carry to prove they have been there. They have to prove they have been there, because no one in their right mind would ever go there. We're not talking purple mountain's majesty here. These are "wheres" with no "theres".

Free to choose any route they want, they assiduously avoid the sane choice of the carefully groomed trail. In fact, again according to the international rules, the course designer strives to make the fastest route, the most difficult to navigate. Thus they are lured into taking the shortest line between two points, which in the Northwest is the proverbial Euclidian beeline which runs through thickets of stinging nettles, devil's club and blackberry brambles. These plants have been so named having been designed by Mother Nature to yield up their succulent fruit only after a bloody good fight.

Have I mentioned water? The kind your mother cautioned you to avoid when you were a kid. Puddles. And mud, oodles of it. According to one twenty-year veteran, the Orienteering Clubs in Northwest have never canceled an event because of bad weather. Rain or shine takes on new meaning when you cannot grab your picnic basket and head for the car.

Courses are divided by experience level. Beginner courses (which are available at every meet along with the basic ABCs) take 30-60 minutes to complete with advanced courses taking about the same. The difference being that the reward for getting better is that you have further to go. Not that the goal is any different. Everyone winds up at the same finish banner, which for ease of organization and in keeping with Scandinavian logic is, you guessed it, right next to the spot where you started.

And this is a sport that bills itself as (I'm not making this up) "the thinking sport." What were they thinking? If you're wondering what possesses these people to ever come back for more you can get a schedule of local and regional events by visiting their web site at www.pnwo.org. The U.S. National Orienteering Federation also has a site at www.orienteering.org.

When asked why he has wasted some four hundred otherwise perfectly good weekends in the last twenty years doing orienteering the author could only gaze longingly at his two national championships and cow pie-sized World Masters gold medal and mumble something about the thrill of being a big fish in a small, albeit, very weird pond. Did I mention cow pies?

Robert Miller is no stranger to Getting Lost, writing, cow pies, bogging through mud, and marketing screenplays in Hollywood. The inter-relatedness of such things is uncanny.