Bedwell Bayfront Park
Event #6 of 6 in the BAOC 2024 Summer Series
Date: (Sun.) Aug. 25, 2024
Location: Menlo Park, CA
Event Director: 
- 650.281.5280
Course Setter: Matthias Kohler
Type: C; At this beginner-friendly park, we have the final event of the 2024 Summer Series. As usual, everyone is welcome, including beginners, and there will be free, short, beginner and intermediate clinics to explain orienteering.
Related Event Information
Course Setter's Notes
By Matthias Kohler
Course Statistics
Course Length Climb Controls
Beginner 2.4 km 50 m 15
Short 3.3 km 110 m 17
Long 5.4 km 120 m 23
General Notes
The park is likely to be fairly busy. Please be considerate of other park users.
There will be no water on the courses. There is a drinking-water fountain near the restrooms (which are near the Assembly Area). To be safe, in case the water fountain does not work, you might want to bring your own water.
Flocks of Canada geese are visiting the park, jackrabbits and a skunk have been spotted, as well as a family of raccoons.
Course Notes
The Start and Finish are the same for all the courses. From the Assembly Area to the Start is 150 m; Finish back to the Assembly Area is 100 m.
Warm up on the paved road to the NW side of the Assembly Area, the western edge of the Park. Please do not leave the paved road along the marsh for warm-up.
There are many controls out in the Park for the three courses, and some are relatively close together. Be sure to check the control ID number to make sure it is one of your controls.
The scale for all the maps is 1:4000, with 2 m (LiDAR) contour intervals. The blue magnetic-north lines are parallel to the map edge.
If you will want water on your course, you must bring your own, because none will be provided.
Beginner Course
The Beginner course will lead you through the Park, essentially on paved and dirt roads, as well as on trails. No special footwear is required — comfortable hiking shoes should work fine. You might have to step a few feet off the trail to “punch” a control.
Make sure you get all 15 controls (in the correct order) before going to the Finish. You might see the Finish banner before you have visited all the controls.
Advanced Courses (Short and Long)
The terrain will be blazing fast, and local, fine, map reading will be important.
All the trails, roads, and parking areas have been removed from the Short and Long course maps.
The Short and Long courses have some controls in common, but the approaches are mostly different.
The Long course map is printed double-sided: Side 1 shows the Start to control #X; Side 2 shows control #X to the Finish.
It is okay to cross the wooden (and partially ruined) fences (ISSprOM 516) within the park.
Most of the park’s grass is mowed, but there are still some patches with taller dried grass to slow you down, and the mowed areas are slippery, with loose grass (straw) on the ground. Areas with scattered trees, where the mower can’t get in, might still have tall dried grass.
Leg coverings and shoes with good traction are advised on the Advanced courses. Be careful with the footing (especially when you are reading the map while running) — there will be some unexpected ground-squirrel holes!
Visibility is great, and the run-ability is unlimited.
The Map
Thanks to the excellent work done by Matej Šebo, the Club’s Mapping Director, the map is updated and upgraded to the International Specifications for Sprint Orienteering Maps (ISSprOM), and is in very good condition.
There is a legend on the map explaining the symbols.
Below, there are references to ISSprOM symbols. You can check map symbols in the latest edition of the International Specification for Sprint Orienteering Maps (ISSprOM 2019-2), which is in this file (8.0MB PDF).
- A sheet showing all the symbols used on Sprint Orienteering maps (but without their ID numbers) is available as this file (601KB PDF).
There are three symbols used for man-made objects as follows:
- The first symbol is the black × (ISSprOM 531), which represents a bench, a sign, or a utility box, to name just a few.
- The second symbol is a blue star, and represents a “Landfill Gas, LFG” object (ISSprOM 313). This object is specific to Bayfront Park, and is called “gas well” in the legend on the map. It typically is a concrete base plate with an about 5-foot-long rod sticking out (see photo below). There are many of them spread over the park. Some are heavily overgrown, so much so that you might see only the rod. They sometimes look like a mound or an overgrown knoll with a pole sticking out.
- The third symbol is the cairn symbol (black circle with a dot at its center, ISSprOM 526). It is used to denote the park’s sequences of rock sculptures (i.e., man-made boulders). These are not used as control features.
The tall-vegetation map markings (green parallel lines, ISSprOM 409) are minimal, and represent current conditions in the park. However, where present, running will be very slow or impossible.
Dead or fallen trees are mapped as brown triangles (ISSprOM 115).
Thickets are mapped accurately. Two levels of green are used: dark green usually represents thick bushes of various sizes (from as small as about 2 m to several tens of meters in diameter), while light green is very often a dense group of short pine trees.
White forest is often a group of Eucalyptus trees.
You will not encounter any out-of-bounds areas on your courses. The only out-of-bounds area marked on the map (purple cross-hatched area [ISSprOM 709]) is the sewage treatment plant at the northwest corner of the map (which is fenced off by the impassable fence symbol [ISSprOM 518]).
Boulders and Cairns
The map uses boulder (ISSprOM 204), big boulder (205), and boulder cluster (207) symbols. Generally these features are smaller than what would normally be mapped, and what we usually encounter at other BAOC events. Only a few boulders are significantly large. Most boulders on the map are rocks about 0.5 m in size. Some boulders and clusters are not easily visible because of overgrowing vegetation.