Orienteers March to Their Own Compass Readings : Former Military Exercise, Popular in Europe, Has Evolved Into a Sport for All Ages

It is not on any map; true places rarely are.

--orienteer Bob Henderson

quoting from “Moby Dick”

The name of the game was orienteering, but Jill Van Houten was seriously disoriented.

She was trying to locate the northeastern corner of a particular clearing at Mt. Palomar State Park in San Diego County. (Orienteers use a map and compass to find their way cross-country to predetermined checkpoints.) Van Houten held a compass in her palm and took a bearing on a dead tree. She slid down a steep bank of wet pine needles in her tennis shoes.

She could not find the designated control point. She could not even find the clearing.

While she was searching, however, Van Houten, 26, did discover a trio of dappled, button-like mushrooms and a glistening spider’s web.

Therein lies a lesson: Orienteers should have the largess to admit being lost, and the presence of mind to enjoy it.

Invented as a military exercise in Scandinavia in the late 1800s, orienteering evolved slowly into a sporting event. When the game was introduced to the U.S. in the 1940s, “It didn’t start with a bang,” said Robin Shannonhouse, executive director of the U.S. Orienteering Federation. It wasn’t until the early ‘70s, when the national organization was formed, that the sport began to grow in this country. Today there are about 10,000 orienteers in the U.S., said Shannonhouse. The game is as popular as any mainstream sport in parts of the Orient, Scandinavian countries and some areas of of Europe.

All that’s required to participate in a meet is a pair of tennis shoes and long pants to protect your legs from brush. (Informal instruction is available at all meets.) Several participants showed up at the Mt. Palomar meet in European orienteering suits made of rip-resistant material. Such special gear is not neccessary, said one man, “It’s just easier than tearing T-shirts.”

You’ll need a compass. They can be rented at the monthly meets of the L.A. or San Diego clubs for 50 cents. (It costs $1 to enter the meet if you’re a club member, $2 if you’re not.) Orienteers prefer a combined compass-protractor that sits on a clear plastic base. They can be purchased for about $10 at sporting goods stores.

There are detailed rules of competition for major meets, and some highly competitive orienteers. (The sport gained some recognition when national orienteering champion Peter Gagarin recently appeared on Wheaties cereal boxes as a winner in General Mills’ “Search for Champions” contest.) But the majority of orienteers compete mostly with themselves, and they harbor highly individual reasons for participating in the sport.

There are geology buffs, ex-Boy Scouts, nature lovers, analytical types and competitive runners looking for a new challenge. (An advanced course may be as long as nine miles.)

Bob Anglin, a sales representative who belongs to the Los Angeles Orienteering Club, makes it a point to challenge runners to try orienteering, also called “cunning running.” But he advises: “Don’t get discouraged the first time you try it.”

While there is a standard of achievement that allows runners to boast about their winnings, Anglin warns, “You can’t sit around and brag about how well you did in the orienteering meet, because nobody knows what you’re talking about.”

Times can vary considerably on a orienteering course. Depending on your personal style of problem solving, you might go twice the actual course distance before you’re through. In orienteering, there are always optional routes. An orienteer is constantly weighing decisions like “Do I go over the hill or take the long, fast way around?” Anglin said. “You don’t have the answer until it’s been done.”

Over beers at day’s end, orienteers are apt to discuss advanced strategies such as how best to conquer a barbed wire fence without losing time. Do you take it at a run, and jump it; or do you flop to the ground just before you hit the fence and roll under it? Orienteer Karen Dennis said that faced with that situation, she looks until she finds a break in the fence and walks through.

‘I Get Lost’

Not all orienteers run. Some say that it’s hard to run and think at the same time. “If I run, I get lost,” said Dennis, of San Diego.

Mike Lebo pointed out the advantages of being slow-but-smart in this sport when he told a story about being passed on a hill by a world-class runner traveling at a rapid rate during one meet. Lebo thought he would surely lose to the more athletic runner--but all was not lost.

“Let me tell you, at 4,000 miles an hour in the wrong direction, you never get there,” chuckled Lebo, who presided at the check-in table at a recent meet wearing a Padres cap and the standard orienteer’s neck ornament: a compass on a dirty string.

“I don’t run at all,” Jill Van Houten said. “Never been a runner. Not much interested in being a runner.”

Van Houten worked as a land surveyor in New York until she got frostbite on the job last winter and made an impulsive move to San Diego. A lover of maps of all kinds, she now works as a draughtsperson for a civil engineer. The job enhances Van Houten’s orienteering skills, and the skills she sharpens on the course make her a better draughtsperson, she said.

“I’ve always been intrigued by how to get from here to there,” she said. “When my family went on trips, I’d be sitting on the front seat with the map and my mom would ask how many exits to where we were going.”

Rough Terrain

The four-colored orienteering maps used at meets include every building, boulder field and power line in the chosen area. The sections colored white on the map are open and runnable; the dark green patches--called “fight” in orienteering jargon--indicate overgrown terrain you might need to fight your way through.

The orienteering maps are so detailed that sometimes park rangers ask for copies to aid them in search-and-rescue operations, said Van Houten.

Orienteering has been adapted to nearly every form of human-powered locomotion. Various clubs have staged ski-o’s (“O” for orienteering; this version involves route-finding on cross-country skis) as well as orienteering by bike, canoe and even scuba diving. At Palomar there was a string-o, an orienteering course for young children in which they followed a piece of string through the woods.

Orienteering is a good game for children, Van Houten said, because you don’t need to be able to read, just to decipher symbols that tell you where your checkpoints will be--three meters southwest of a boulder pile, for instance, or where a stream intersects the south side of a road.

At every meet there’s a course for beginners requiring no compass work. Higher level courses may demand bushwhacking talents and the ability to use map and compass to pinpoint control spots far from trails and other distinguishing features. When an orienteer finds a control, marked by an orange and white nylon flag, he or she punches a corresponding spot in the game card.

At the premiere orienteering event in the world, the five-day O-ringen held in Sweden, there may be as many as 30,000 competitors, Van Houten said. Local meets attract anywhere from 30 to 100 people.

“We’re ambivalent about the numbers of people,” Ed Gookin said. Smaller races are less of a headache to administer, he said. And even though most orienteers enjoy the close-knit feeling of these small meets, they would like to let others know about the sport.

Gookin, a technician in the geology department at UC San Diego, and his wife, Donna, have traveled as far as Quebec to attend meets. His three children all orienteer; his 24-year-old daughter, Karen, was out on the course while Gookin recorded times at the finish.

Gookin said he and his brother, Bill, also an orienteer, ran track in high school in the 1950s, then they graduated to competitive road runs as adults.

‘A Mental Challenge’

“We liked running an awful lot,” he said, “but running is just running. You get a great physical workout, but with orienteering you also get a mental challenge.”

At the check-in table, someone had posted a list of hazards to look out for on the course: rattlesnakes, stinging nettles, poison oak and rosebushes. Because orienteers wander in the uncharted zones off the trail, there is always the possibility of getting injured or lost. Competitors wear whistles to signal if they’re in trouble. If someone hasn’t completed a course in three hours, event organizers send a team to hunt for them.

Other than an occasional sprained ankle, though, orienteering doesn’t seem to be a hazardous sport. (Van Houten said the worst thing that befell her in five years of orienteering was when her wire-rim glasses froze to her cheek during a meet in New York.)

Taped beside the list of hazards at the course start there was also a selection of joys to be encountered on the course: “Deer, wildflowers, birds, bubbling streams, waving meadows and much more.”

Once they’re on the course, good orienteers rely on their compasses very little. Here, elusive qualities come into play. It’s not enough to be a blazing runner or a whiz with a map. One writer in Orienteering North America, a magazine published in Cambridge, Mass., suggested that orienteers try to find a balance between trusting the map and trusting the terrain.

And when all external guides fail you and you’re lost? Tucson orienteer Becky Norris, also writing in Orienteering North America, advises consulting an inner guide: “Relax,” she wrote. “Listen to your heart pound, smell the greasewood and relish the breezes. Sense when you are near your next control, and then start looking.”

For more information on orienteering and addresses of local clubs, write the National Orienteering Federation, P.O. Box 1444, Forest Park, Ga . , 30051.