Epping NW (National)
Results | Routegadget | Report
Ray Curtis, Organiser:
It has been over 15 years that we based our Epping North West event at High Beech, with car parking nearby. Since then we have had our event centre further away, as the area has become more popular with the general public. More recently car parking charges have been introduced, which have discouraged some of the public parking around here. So with a greater number of competitors than usual, congratulations to our car parking team for fitting all cars in the available car parks….and thank you competitors for sharing transport where possible.
Thanks also to our Start team for making things run so smoothly and to accommodate late time changes for a few competitors. Thanks to the Event Centre team for dealing with last minute queries as well as a smoothly working download and results. Lastly thanks to Harold and his Forest team. His courses were appreciated with a number of favourable comments received afterwards. Also all but one person had returned by course closing time. This meant all controls were collected by 3:30pm, just before daylight had faded. Finally, a big thank you to the Epping Forest Visitor Centre and the Corporation of London’s Epping Forest conservators for making the event happen
Harold Wyber, Planner
Epping North West offers a good variety of terrain types, from the gully-strewn slopes immediately north and south of High Beach to the heavily pitted terrain in the south west and the flat, often marshy land to the north east; to the extent that course length and technical difficulty guidelines permitted, I attempted to make the most of these on the courses planned and I hope that competitors appreciated the results. One of my main goals for most of the longer courses was to include at least a handful of long legs going across the area, with the Black course featuring two legs bordering on 1km. It’s been great to see how many competitors have taken the time to record their passage around their course on RouteGadget and, looking at the Black course in particular seems to suggest that the log legs had the desired effect in terms of showing an interesting range of route choices. I also tried to make the most of the flat area to the north east with lots of legs criss-crossing the terrain, aiming to introduce a middle-distance flavour to proceedings as competitors approached the finish. While the weather arguable wasn’t ideal, it was great to hear a lot of competitors saying how much they enjoyed the courses and the area. I would like to note my thanks to Tony, Adam, Jacob, Iain and Donatas who helped set out and take in controls and I am particularly indebted to Jim as the controller for his advice and guidance as well as for his kind words about how the event went.
Jim Prowling, Controller:
Crossing minor roads on Epping NW, without timing out, had to be accepted (and always has been) as an inevitability if the area is to be used at all. Harold wanted long legs with multiple route choices across the scarp slope. The aim was to achieve this with freedom to cross minor roads without people running along them. He wanted all the best routes to be available, not prohibited. I think he achieved this. Harold was a pleasure to work with. My preference as a controller has always been, if at all possible, to visit, agree and tape all potential control locations on site with the planner, rather than the controller hunting alone for, and not always finding, bits of tape placed by the planner previously. Harold was of a like mind, and two visits saw all control sites agreed and taped. This was mainly facilitated by Harold, who arrived on each occasion armed with his laptop, which he carried round the forest and navigated accurately mostly straight to the sites, and then waited patiently for me to satisfy myself that we had the right locations. The laptop enabled any necessary adjustments to the courses to be made on the spot. I would stress that this is not a method of operating that I would recommend for elderly decrepit orienteers, such as myself, with a tendency to fall over!
