Jubillee Rogaine

Yesterday morning was the Rogaine orienteering event out at Jubillee State Park near Kickapoo, IL. A rogaine is essentially a timed orienteering event where you try and accumulate as many controls as you can within an alotted amount of time. We had 4 hours to get a maximum of 25 controls. I met Pam out there about 15 minutes before the mass start, just enough time to get the map and sign up and really not enough time to route plan. We quickly decided to work on the southwestern quadrant of the park. Not good. Right from the start I miscalculate our starting point and we drifted off too far west on a nice chunk of single track. Ran about 20 minutes before finally getting oriented at a trial junction near a creek crossing. Ended up doing some decent (for us) rough navigating and managed to bag our first control.

The park was covered in about 3 inches of snow, which is just the coolest damn thing to run on, made even cooler by all the bushwhacking you get to do off trail, and we traversed open prairie, creek beds, climbed steep reentrants and scrambled through briars. This is so much fun you don't even care about the 20 degree temps and wind chills somewhere closer to zero. In total we bagged 7 controls for 14 points in about 2 hours 45 minutes. I feel that with more time to study the map we could've logged 3 or 4 more. I still have alot of practicing to do before I get competent at orienteering. I'll try and scan our map with the route traced tomorrow to demonstrate what happened and where improvements can be made. That said, there a million worse ways to spend a winter Saturday afternoon. I'm a convert.