Table of contents

“Corona” Course at Trione-Annadel State Park

Dates: June 27, 2020 to ??
Location: Santa Rosa, CA
Course Setter:
Type: Training; Streamered Middle course for practice/exercise during the shutdown

Photo gallery image (click to enlarge)


May 1st Update

Bill Cusworth has placed this course on MapRun. He also replaced all the flagging on the course with the biodegradable flagging (https://www.presco.com/safety-marking-products/products/roll-flagging/) that Nav-X has been using for their courses. (You don't have to feel guilty about leaving this flagging in the woods​—​it decomposes in 6–24 months.) (Thanks Bill!)

General Notes


I have streamered an interesting Middle training course at Trione-Annadel State Park (https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=480). (We’ve known this park as Annadel State Park, but California State Parks renamed it Trione-Annadel State Park in 2016 to honor the primary benefactor of the park.)

A Google Sheet for registration is here (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/156Ld2Hx7iy7F9CgcHr9cs5GrpZanDzr_WA2bU468P38/edit#gid=0). Please use it to enter your expected start time, as well as your time on the course. (We want to know that you returned safely!)

This is just for fun, so everything is on the honor system: time yourself if you wish, “punch” at each control by getting within 1 meter of it (like an air punch; no need to touch anything).

Course Notes

Annadel is a wonderfully complex park. The course technical difficulty is high, and typical for a Middle course; you will need to be very careful with your fine navigation. Running conditions are good, there are lots of rocks, there are stickers, but not much poison oak (which you can avoid).

The course statistics are:

Annadel “Corona” Middle: 3.9 km, 140 m climb, 16 controls

The controls themselves feature pink streamers, usually wrapped around a tree trunk or hanging on a branch, about 2 feet from the ground.

Safety

Map

The course map is available here (1.3MB PDF). Please print your own map. It fits on letter-sized paper (8.5x11, Portrait orientation).

The map is old. Bill Cusworth vetted the course and made some important map corrections (Thanks Bill!). This map is not Lidar-based; the vegetation has changed a bit; the rocks have not moved.

The map scale is 1:7500, with a 5-meter contour interval.

Note: A new version of the map was posted at 9:30 AM on July 7 (the new file name includes "v2"). (For reference, the original map is available here [1.3MB PDF], but please do not use that map to run the course.) Gavin explained the changes as follows:

"We moved #11 east a bit to avoid the temptation to cross the meadow, and also made some small improvements to the map quality in the vicinity of various controls.
"The course was 3.848 km long, and is now 3.859 km long. Condes rounds down, so the old clue sheet says 3.8 km and the new v2 clue sheet says 3.9 km, but actually there’s only 11 m difference."

Directions and Parking

Park on Park Trail Drive near these coordinates: 38.440809,-122.653128.

Note: That location is on the west side of the park, far from the main park entrance.

From the street-side parking on Park Trail Drive, it is about a 1.2 km walk to the Start and 2.5 km walk back from the Finish.

The map has arrows and an inset on it to help you get to the Start and to get back from the Finish. [Editor's note: If the inset is not displayed when you open the map, close it and open it again. (It happens to me. 🙁)]

Here are written directions:

Miscellaneous

Dogs are not allowed in the park.

If you’d like to donate to the club for this, please do so at a future event ... whenever that will be.

Again, you don’t need to touch anything, and you don’t need to get anywhere near anyone else. Of course, you are on your own recognizance, at your own risk.

Have fun!

Cheers,


775-691-6384
(June 27, 2020)


Course Comments

I really enjoyed doing the Annadel course today. How long has it been since we have been allowed to hold a regular event there? 10 years or more? Too bad, since the terrain is first-rate. Perhaps we should continue to set streamered practice courses on maps that we can no longer use for regular club events, even after the current crisis is over. China Camp also comes to mind as an area at which I would like to go out on a practice course, by myself.

[Editor's note: The latest event at Annadel was in Nov. 2012. That event followed an even longer gap from March 2003 (http://baoc.org/results/r03/r030330.html) (which had 413 participants, with 300 on the White & Yellow courses!).]

I had forgotten how rocky the terrain is in that part of the map. Rocks everywhere, and it was sometimes difficult for me to figure out which rocks were on the map, and which rocks were not. So I made a few navigational errors, and a couple of other times, I did not see the pink streamer right away, even when I was almost right on top of the control location. In any case, it was a really good map-reading and compass-work exercise, of the type that we don’t get on most of our other maps.

The only streamer that I could not find at all was at #8. It’s hard for me to believe I was at the wrong fight patch, as there was only one in the area, and I took another bearing back to it from the trail junction SE of the control, just to make sure. So I hung another pink streamer there, although, given my track record in finding streamers, it’s entirely possible that the original one was there all along. I also hung a small streamer at the start triangle, as it wasn’t at a completely obvious location like a trail junction. (But oops, I’m noticing just now that the control description of the start triangle is on the west side of the west rock, not between the two rocks. I hung my streamer between the two rocks. Maybe the next person who goes out there can adjust it ....)

The walk to the Start was a bit of an uphill slog, but the walk back to the parking area was mostly down a very pretty shaded canyon, which I certainly have never been to before. So don’t let the long return walk dissuade you from doing the course.

Thanks to Gavin and Bill for setting this up!

Steve Gregg
(July 5, 2020)


Like Steve, I very much enjoyed the Annadel course. I was debating whether to make the 3-hour round trip there and back, plus the long walks to the Start and back to the car, but it was worth it. Like Morgan Territory, Annadel has some of the Bay Area’s most technical terrain. Gavin did a great job of designing a nice Middle-distance course. Lots of relatively short legs requiring careful map reading. My only big navigational error was at 11. I’d like to blame the mapping of the vegetation (there seemed to be much more green than mapped), but that is probably because I overshot it and had to head back. Nice to have a course without humongous reentrants and life-threatening cliffs. The walk back along a relatively steep rocky terrain next to the big chasm made me think I should consider having a knee replacement, as going downhill, even with a hiking stick, is very uncomfortable.

Thanks Gavin and Bill.

Evan Custer
(July 19, 2020)


I agree with Evan that the toughest part of this course was the downhill walk back. Leslie & I felt much enjoyment in being back in Annadel. It is the best BAOC terrain and has been off limits to us for so long. Thanks to Gavin and Bill for making it happen.

George Minarik
(July 20, 2020)


I did the Annadel Corona course on Friday. Not the coolest day of the week, but I already had planned my day off, so it had to be done. Good sense be damned. 😉

Great course. I walked the whole time though, and would definitely have missed some controls if I had been running it.

I found all the streamers except #12.

#7: I walked by the streamer (thinking the spur would be difficult to miss ... well, it wasn't) and I had to backtrack but found it on my second attempt.

#8: I got right to the ticket, but couldn't see the streamer (also got confused with the clue: did this point inside the ticket ... heat can do that to you). Then walked to the trail, back tracked to end up at the same ticket. I looked at my map to see what, for Pete's sake, I could have done wrong, then looked up to see the streamer literally less than 5 inches from my nose. Not sure whether my (slight) color blindness has anything to do with it, but I have a hard time finding those streamers.

#10: No problem here, but there is also an unmapped pit at the foot of the cliff just north of the control cliff. Granted it is too close to the trail, but not trusting my own eyes anymore I spent a few minutes bent over slowly scanning the pit rock by rock. That's the only time I saw other people on the course (walking the trail). You can only wonder what they must have been thinking​—​though they weren't worried enough to ask me whether I needed help. 😉

#12: Just couldn't find it. I spent 35 minutes looking for it, attacking it from different angles (the tree/rootstock from the east, the trail from the south, the north-west clearing from the east, ...). As my RouteGadget route shows, I must have been in the right location but just failed to see it. By that time around 2 PM, it was around 105°, so the streamer might have there been right in front of me. When I started chasing moss hair hanging from the trees, I knew it was time to move on. Was the streamer on the ground or hanging from a tree branch?

The walk back was nice. George/Evan: I hear you. But I don't think in this heat I could have made it up a hill like the one after the Joseph Grant Corona course. So, Gavin, bless you for the downhill!!

Thank you Gavin & Bill. You made that beer later that day taste mighty good.

Theo Verhoeven
(Aug. 17, 2020)

Responses:

Hey Theo,
Glad you made it out there. Hot it was. Wow!!
Control #12 should have four streamers: two hanging from a bush, and two tied all the way around a 10” diameter tree trunk. All are about 2 feet from the ground. The tree-trunk streamers are visible from all directions, from quite a ways off.
I think the bush streamers may have blown over the bush, and could be hiding between the bush and very nearby rock​—​making the bush streamers hard to see. This happened before, and is the reason I added the tree-trunk streamers.
I can’t explain what happened to the tree-trunk streamers. I’m gonna go look if I get a chance in the next few days. You shouldn’t have had any trouble seeing them. Maybe squirrels??
I did Matej’s course at Morgan Territory, and also had the devil of a time seeing the streamers. Like you, I was literally a few inches from one of them without seeing it. Of course, it’s good to know that I can navigate to within a few inches of where I should be (well, sometimes). 😉
Gavin Wyatt-Mair
I went there this morning. I found the pink streamers that Gavin put out, and I added an orange streamer (I didn't have any pink streamer). You can see the flagging only while looking from the south/southeast. Even though I've been there several times, I still had trouble finding it since the feature is not very distinct and there are actually two knolls in the area (i.e., one is not mapped). It looks like some of Gavin's original streamers were eaten by deer or something.
Bill Cusworth
(Aug. 18, 2020)


Course on RouteGadget

The Annadel “Corona” training course is now on RouteGadget. Visit RouteGadget for an introduction, or go directly here (http://baoc.org/gadget/cgi/reitti.cgi) to draw your route. (To see other RouteGadget events worldwide, visit this website (http://www.routegadget.net).)

Since there was no E-punch, I set up the event using the “no results” mode, which requires a bit more effort to enter your route.

Drawing Your Route Manually

You need to enter your name (please include your time after your name), total time, and optionally any cumulative splits that you might have taken. Both splits and total time need to be in MMMSS format. For example, 0:57 is entered as “57”, 5 min 43 sec as “543”, and 1:12:32 as “7232”. That's easy.

Uploading Your GPS Track

You need to enter only your name (please include your time after your name)​—​total time and splits are not required as with manual entry. (RouteGadget automatically adds “GPS” ahead of your name.)

Since there are no E-punch splits, it's very challenging for RouteGadget to fit GPS tracks to the course automatically, especially as our maps are not georeferenced. Thus, you will need to adjust your track manually more than usual.

When you upload your GPS track, there are three blue adjustment points that you can move to adjust your track. There are typically points at the start and finish of the track, and a third one somewhere in the middle of the track.

The trick is to add more blue adjustment points by right-clicking the track anywhere you would like to add a new point. I typically add a blue dot at every control location on my track, as those are easy to identify because of the notable direction change. Then I drag the blue dots to the corresponding control locations on the course. Note that you can remove a blue dot by right-clicking on it.

Happy Routes,

(July 27, 2020)