The area being used for the championships is ideal. It will be very technical with few trails on Saturday for the advanced courses. The forest is a pleasure to run in. You will love this terrain.

The courses have been designed to make the most of the terrain. That means it will be a great challenge. It is very difficult to relocate in the terrain, as easy relocation features are usually not available. Linear features are rare and inconvenient on the advanced courses.

Anyone with a clean run is likely to be near or at the top of the leader board. I believe an excellent orienteer could post a very fast time given the runnability of the woods, but time spent mapreading will slow you down. For the 1 Day Championships courses I am targeting the high end of the winning times for the courses(i.e. ~85 minutes for Blue). But I do anticipate non winning times to be higher than usual due to the technical challenge and unforgiving terrain.

The non advanced courses will be in similar terrain that has numerous trails and a few clearings.

Day 2: Sunday will have a greater variety of terrain than Day 1. There will be portions that are similar to Day 1, but there will also be areas with extensive trail networks, large fields and pine plantations. I anticipate winning times will be faster on Day 2.

The area being used for the championships is moraine terrain. It is dominated by small hills and depressions. There are over 500 depressions, many of which are small. Depressions vary greatly in size. The smallest are just a few feet deep and a few yards across. The largest ones can be 20 meters deep and 50-200 meters across. Large depressions often have smaller depressions and hills/knolls in them. See map samples at the bottom of this page.

The forest is oak and maple with some pine plantation. It is generally runnable. White woods are very open. The light green forest also tends to be very runnable and is often close to white in runnability. The medium green is generally not difficult to pass through, though it may be harder to see where you are stepping. It is often almost light green in runnability. In late October, the vegetation should be down and visibility should be good. Some trails will be harder than usual to see due to fallen leaves.

There is little in the way of brambles or other painful vegetation. Footing is also generally good. I have seen some poison ivy, but not in many places.

You will find that the contours are good and plentiful. They should be your means of navigation, not vegetation in most cases.

Due to the complex nature of the terrain the contour interval is 3 meters. Scale will probably be 1-10,000 for all courses. The blue course may be at 1-15,000. The other courses will NOT be at 1-15,000. The maps will be laser prints.

Black x's in the forest are usually hunter forts made out of tree branches.

One symbol that might cause confusion is the small depression symbol. Some of the small depressions are the usual very small depressions that you are used to seeing. At other times the small depression symbol indicates a rather deep depression which is bigger than you'd normally anticipate. The reason for that is when drafting the depressions that had contours they were often so small that the tick mark on the inside was hard to see. It was easier to read the map using the small depression symbol, instead of having small circle contours with an unreadable tick mark inside. So, the depressions are relatively small in width, but not so small in depth. I have never had a problem with navigating using the map with the symbols as is. But the depressions are sometimes bigger than what you would expect to see.

The area being used for the 2009 U.S. Championships was formed where two glacial lobes flowed together. Debris collected in the ice where the lobes met. Meltwater deposited outwash on top of the ice. The outwash collapsed into hummocky topography when the ice beneath it melted. When the glaciers receded, the moraine formed a high point in the landscape. The surrounding area is till plains with drumlins, eskers and pitted outwash plains.