Alaska Orienteering Festival Results

Saturday August 3 and 4, 2024
Willow Creek and Hatcher Pass

The 2024 Alaska Orienteering Festival was the Arctic Orienteering Club’s first two-day competition and camp-out in more than 20 years. Nearly 40 people traveled to the Hatcher Pass/Willow area to compete in a pair of highly challenging new venues using two brand-new maps over two days. For the people who participated in some or all of the event, great weather made for some prolonged finish area socializing and delightful overnight camping in the alpine area near the top of Hatcher Pass.

The real star of the show was the orienteering itself. The Saturday event was held in an area just north of Willow, where the vegetation is mostly open forest, but some late-summer undergrowth in places slowed down the running. The intricate glacial kettle terrain is riddled with innumerable small, round depressions, most with a bright eye of clearing in the center. It’s interesting in and of itself, but the area’s most striking feature is a discrete area of dense medium green foliage with distinct yellow clearing pockets like blobs of moldy cheese. Here, the vegetation boundaries don’t always directly correlate to the small-scale hills and ridges, which complicates the navigation even more. The overall effect is of a maze within a maze, a landscape requiring constant vigilance by runners if they want to maintain their connection to the highly-detailed  new map. It was possible to navigate precisely, but even elite racers on Saturday were bamboozled by the shear abundance of parallel features. With with very few trails from which they could easily reorient themselves, several runners logged their longest ever splits for legs where the control points were only a few hundred meters apart. Still, most people enjoyed the navigational work out, and the feeling of success that comes with a good leg in difficult terrain. Most people came away from the first day’s event tired, a little brush-scratched, but thrilled by the challenge of the new Willow venue.

After picking up the control stations, most of the crew headed up Willow Creek about 20 miles and set up camp at a group camping/cookout location on a beautiful alpine bench just southwest of Sunday’s Craigie Creek venue. The festive group of nearly 30 people shared food and good company until well after the sun went down.

Racers awoke to a brilliant sunny morning in Hatcher Pass. They made their way the last couple of miles up the road to the second day start area near the mouth of Craigie Creek where they chose between Short 7K or Long 12K  courses, both of which led participants up a treeless alpine valley and onto rugged glacier-carved benches and meadows above. The 1:10,000 scale maps for this event are notably yellow with a few small areas of thicker willow undergrowth in the lowlands and expanses of scree mapped as light gray in the steep mountains to the East. Within the gray, areas of larger-scale talus and boulder fields are represented by a pattern of black triangles, impassable cliffs by solid black, and very large cliff areas by black with “windows” cut from the center to show the underlying topography of the ridges. (Although courses were not designed to take runners through the steepest terrain, the tops of ridges were included in the extent of the map to aid the large-scale navigation.) The wide-open sight-lines were a welcome relief after Saturday’s intensely close route finding, and they enabled runners to see and navigate around lower elevation vegetation. Additionally, the relatively small scale of the double-sided maps enabled course setters to utilize the area’s convoluted topography, and racers to plan their routes to avoid the precisely-mapped talus slopes, if they chose. Impressively, a number of junior orienteers competed in teams or even solo on the short map, clocking some of the fastest times for that course. Of the long course runners, some of the typically fastest and cleanest runners were thrown off their game when they tried to interpret the vast expanse of visible topography and directed themselves to ridges and knobs hundreds of vertical feet too far up or down a slope. Others more used to mountain terrain found the navigation exhilarating yet straightforward and gamboled around the alpine tarns and through the high traverses with ease. Racers were enchanted by hidden lakes, towering boulders, burbling streams, blooming heather, an open mine shaft, and a bizarre blue wheelbarrow posed on a sharp ridge line. One long course runner summed it up something like this, “Why have you kept this venue from us? This is what orienteering is supposed to be!”

Here’s a link to an album with lots of photos Springer, Mark and Jen took: https://photos.app.goo.gl/ysTZxXBkV3CAuUXw6 Feel free to download them or add your best.

Thank you to Regan Sarwas for setting the first day’s event and to Ian and Springer Moore and Jen Jolliff for setting the second day’s event. Special thanks to Ian and Dorn for map production, Diane for Day 1 event table management, Jen Jolliff for bringing snacks, Diane, Dorn, Ellery, Bill and Scott for picking up Day 1 controls, Dorn and Diane for buying the food, Mark for grilling, and Jenny for carting Regan around to set up and collect controls. Thanks again to Ian Moore for discovering this area and the many hours he spent scouting and mapping it for us. Finally, thanks to everyone who brought food/drink to share and took the time to participate in the courses. Your positive energy made this a very special event.

Check out the Festival website for electronic results. Be sure to upload your tracks to Live Lox!

Day 1 – Willow Creek Classics:

Day 2 – Hatcher Pass Mountain-O: