2.5 or 5 meters?

2.5 or 5 meter contour lines, that is the question.

Thoughts?
I think I will go with 2.5 meter ones.

Homebrew OC Winter 2012 1 results, Mt Tiger

These are approximate results, they will be corrected.

Place	Orcs	Race Time	Start time	Notes
1	Nikolay	1:07:59	12:20
2	Will	1:24:00	12:17
3	Kean/Rick	1:48:00	12:15
4	Miles	1:57:00	12:07
5	Aaron/Brice	2:07:00	12:09
6	Murray/Christi	2:20:00	12:05
7	Debbie/Ing	2:28:00	12:01
	Hobbits	Time
1	Jan	1:08:32	12:03
2	Ina	1:23	:00?	Course backwards
3	Eileen	2:00:18	12:11
4	Don	1:30:00	12:22	Skipped 1&2
5	Doug/Alan	DNF	12:13	skipped a bunch
6	Sergiy, Valery and Max

Course Setter: Peteris
Start&Finish: Gunta&Emily
Refreshments: Rick&Eileen
Course pickup: Eric Bone
Route gadget: Jan Urban

More information will be provided as it becomes available. 

Rules of home-brewing

When doing homebrew orienteering race there is only one rule:
The map is new or it is updated from the previous bad state to a not-so-bad state (but most likely still pretty bad state). That means that the map will most likely be very far from a good quality map, but we must try hard to make it enjoyable.

Homebrew is looking for...

We are looking for mapmakers, course setters, controls pickers, anything goes.
The new season is looking exciting...

We are planning on the following events (not all will happen):

Quincy lakes: Quincy south (old map, to be updated), Quincy North, which consists of Quincy middle and Quincy North (two new maps, work under-way, we need to to field work there). The plan would be to have 3 races in a weekend.
Tiger North (new map, first scouting done there - looking for help with map).
Willows fjords (old map, to be updated)
Crestwoods park (old map, to be updated)
Drunken Charlie (old map, to be updated)

Then there is a sprint map of Redmond Triangle in works (also known as our current apartment complex, but   very questionable if anything can happen there).

Largest homebrew event ever

In honor of our daughter Emily, we held an event on our neighborhood map.
32 participants for the run with 17 timed starts!!!

1k course
	Atis & Graham	0:48:00
	Ruta, Vytas ir Vytas	0:57:00
	Viswanathan family	0:58:00
3k course
	Margaret, Jen & Rick	1:01:00
	Zachary, Kathy and Miles	1:10:42
	Sawyer & James	1:17:00
	Christi & Scot & Lucky	1:22:00
5k course
	Will	0:51:00
	Rick	0:56:05
	Dave	0:56:42
	Jan	1:01:20
	Connie & Colin	1:01:55
	Debbie	1:23:00
	Lisa & Murray	1:34:00
	Stella	1:39:00
	Mike	2:17:00
Modified 1k course
	Alyona, Dmitry, Dmitry	0:48:00

Thanks to everyone who participated.
Route gadget is here. Please enter your routes.

From Jan: "Remind people, that they can enter either the gps route, or they can enter their route manually, but in that case they have to enter their splits (not mandatory) or at least their total time in format mmmss, thus for somebody entering 1 hour, 1 minute and 20 seconds, it will be "6120". They will also have to enter their name."

The map - contours from PSLC website, street data and building footprints from Kirkland GIS.
Aerial photos from different sources.

Quincy lakes South

This is the first map of Quincy lakes - it's South part. There is a virtual O' course set there. If anyone wants to try it out, let me know. The scale of the map as drawn is 1:10000, but for printing out, 1:15000 currently is used to... SUPPORT MY HOME PRINTER...The course is set to be 8.1 km long, but can easily be shortened.

What is the quality of the map currently? 

Trails are drawn from pictures and some 2 year old GPS traces. We were very active in this place 2 years ago when a small training adventure race was put on. 

Contours are from USA 10 meter grid DEM. That means that the smaller re-entrants are clearly missing. 

Vegetation is as it is seen from pictures and not 100% correct thus. I believe the map is usable for training purposes. White vegetation is rough open land. 

Rocks are guesses from the satellite pictures again. 

This is how to get to the start area from Seattle.

The area is quite rattlesnake infested, but I expect that they are still quite passive at this time of year. 

Dungeness spit

I have been playing around on-line data from Dungeness recreation area. This is what I have accumulated it into.

They say it is a 230 acre park, so half of Bridle trails (460 acres). Just in case someone is out for vacation there, it might be worthwhile looking into this map. Vegetation is approximate at this point. Roads and tax parcel information from Clallam county GIS. Contours are 2.5 meter ones from, current scale is 1:7500. The area is interesting because it has different vegetation and is open to general public off-trail at least in the southern part of it - hunting is allowed there during hunting season.

Final results to Willows Fjords 2012

Willows Fjords course is closed.
These are now final results of WF2012:

Course 2:
Jan/Ing 1:46
Rick/Kean 1:50
Ing/Susan/Debbie 2:28

Route gadget.

Willows Fjords

Willows Fjords challenge is up:
For potential parking, start and finish locations, see here.
For general description of the trails, see here (Evergreen MTB).
Please respect no trespassing signs and play responsibly.

The map you will be running on:

I hope to get at least 2 runners, so that there is some competition.
For map with checkpoints, please email me.

Lidar points as township rectangles

Puget sound lidar consortium shares King County lidar data as "township" rectangles (terminology is weak here). In any case, the whole county is described by coordinates such as ak23 and bc20.
A rather non-helping image is shared by King County GIS services which ends up helping me to guess that I need something around ak20, downloading that and then counting from that one, which one I really need. Hopefully the guess was close enough.
So, to solve this ridiculous issue, I did the following - I put topo maps using global mapper on top of these township rectangles. No more guessing!
It is not the best quality one, but certainly very helpful, so I share the result.

Now we know that ax35 is Drunken Charlie lake, an32/an31 - willows fjords, ar11 - sawyer lake.
Now more guessing!

Two point five maps in works

FYI, there are 2.5 maps in works.
Crestwoods park has been looked at, drawn and found almost good to go. Nikolay Nachev, team USA orienteer is test running a course on it this week. The date of the race most likely will be some late April or so.

Second map - Willows Fjords has been run in and a base map is being made. Two great resources have been found for usage with it:

1. Switchbacks.com, which provides Garmin GPS compatible map files of GPS-ed trails of Western Washington. It is not the most useful in terms of GPS quality, bvut for overall understanding of what is happening around - it is just great.
2. Redmond GIS - building bases, roads, etc, - all for download. 

Finally - we are trying to figure out what to do with Moss lake. There seem to be lots of trails, but we need to go there and take a look, the progress on this one is minuscule.

First event results

Murray&Peteris: run time around 3:20. CPs reached - 1,2,3,4,5,6,7. At 7 the wet snow became very, very cold and we bailed out.

On the run: it took as 20 minutes or so to get to the start, CP1 - 30 minutes. CP20 - 30 minutes, CP3 - 15 minutes and so on.

This post will be updated if more runners attempt it or more data comes in (gpx files).
On the other hand, I made some updates to the map. Very approximate, very home-brew.
Here it is:

Homebrew O', first event

Hello. The image is an image of partial homebrew lake charlie map. No small features, just lidar contours, some roads. Most of data is from King county GIS warehouse.
The meaning of this exercise is mostly contours.
Take a look at this google map. Point A is where you leave your cars, point B is the start.
To print out the map, click on it, it should open it in full screen, save it as a jpeg file and print it at 600 dpi. It should yield you 1:15000 map. The horizontal distance between the magnetic lines is 1km (I believe).
If you happen to do this training event, please post your results and what you saw in the comments.

Note: map is updated, I had disabled every 5th contour line.