The Edmonton Overlanders Orienteering Club navigated their way to St. Albert Wednesday night for the club’s weekly event. Over 50 participants made their way through the Kingswood and Riverlot 56 areas with maps in hand.
The club holds orienteering events every Wednesday from the end of April to mid-September. Most urban events are held in Edmonton’s river valley, and others take place in forested areas outside the city, but once every year the club comes to St. Albert.
Orienteering is a navigation sport where participants locate a series of numbered locations indicated on a map. Participants must reach the checkpoints in the specific numbered order. The goal is to move through the checkpoints and to the finish in the fastest time possible.
St. Albert’s Greg Yarkie is a 17-year member of the Overlanders club and the current Canadian Orienteering Champion in the 65-75 age category.
Yarkie says the orienteers are equipped with only a map and compass to navigate their way to the checkpoints. They are not allowed to use a GPS.
“For the events, it’s really kind of useless because you don’t know the coordinates,” Yarkie says. “By the time you figure all that stuff out and where the different places are, the event would probably be over.”
One of the club’s orienteering events on a Wednesday night typically lasts from 6 to 9 p.m. More experienced orienteers typically finish in about an hour, but Yarkie says that the volunteers stay until everyone has finished the course.
No experience is necessary for those who want to give orienteering a try.
“If people come out and they haven’t orienteered before and they just want to get out there and try it, there are always volunteers at the start that will give you instructions on how to best complete your course and how to proceed with it,” Yarkie says.
The Overlander events also cater to different skill levels. There is a three-kilometre beginners course that Yarkie says is usually on trails so that people don’t get lost, a four-kilometre medium course for those fairly proficient at orienteering and a six-kilometre course for the more elite orienteers.
“When we’re setting courses for more experienced orienteers we try to make it so that they have to figure out good routes,” Yarkie says. “We put objects in the way so they’ll have to go around a lake or a small pond or a big hill or cliffs or something like that so they can’t go straight to it. So they’ve got to find the most expedient route.”
The maps used for the events are made specifically for orienteering with much more detail than traditional maps because the numbered locations on the map correspond with features in the physical terrain.
“They’re all at locations that are identifiable on the map. So like a boulder, a hilltop or a road crossing or something of that nature. They have to be something specific marked on the map,” he says. “And then there’s a little code on the side of the map telling you what those locations are – a boulder or a stream crossing or a gully or something like that.”
To create the orienteering maps Yarkie says they typically begin with aerial three-dimensional photos that are then sent to a lab that traces out the contours and general shapes.
“They can see that,” says Yarkie. “They can tell where ponds are and fields are and edges of trees so they give a base map and then somebody has to go into the forest and check out all the details and confirm them and upgrade them – add detail to it.”
Yarkie says those details are then entered into a computer program to create the map. He and a friend created the map for the St. Albert event using Google images and contour maps from the City of St. Albert. They then visited the site to gather the detail that was then used to create the map using computer software.
In addition to the Wednesday night events, the Overlanders club holds about eight competitions every season called forest events. Yarkie and seven other members will be heading to the Western Canadian Orienteering Championships in Manitoba over the August long weekend.
For more information on the club and orienteering events, visit the Overlanders website at www.orienteer.ab.ca
