Wachusett Mountain, Princeton, MA
November 11, 2018
Meet Director: Jonathan Campbell

PANO Wachusett thumb

View from NW flank of Mt. Wachusett. (Mt. Greylock on horizon?)
Click panorama to enlarge. More photos under menu News>Galleries.

The New England Orienteering Club's Nov. 11, 2018 event at Wachusett Mountain State Reservation was a grand series of experiments. Hopefully, no harm came from our testing.

With 7.7-square kilometers of terrain mapped for orienteering, Wachusett Mountain offers areas of intricate rock detail, other areas of complicated contours, and still other areas of vague hillside, on a predominantly light green map, reflecting an understory of beech trees. Thankfully, the leaves were all down, allowing for much greater visibility in the woods. Last updated in the 90s, many parts of the map aged well, and NEOC was past due to try another event here—last used in the early 00s.

With weather dipping into the high 20s overnight, the water controls had to be buried in leaves and then un-buried in the morning to prevent less-than-helpful gallon-size ice cubes. We were able to enjoy the bright sun and crisp 40-degree weather on the lawn of the Gates Farm, a homestead donated by the Gates Family to the state in the late 60s for inclusion in the park. Using parking along Westminster Rd, we accessed the southern and western portions of the map, a popular area for local hikers, bikers, and dog walkers.

The Reservation holds some rare pockets of New England old-growth forest, mainly on the steeper, rockier hillsides, and our courses avoided the old growth and minimized traffic in the associated protective buffer zone. There was plenty of climb on all courses, though that's to be expected when running on the back side of a ski slope. The water features were high from recent rains, and more than one person reported mistaking a trail for a stream bed, causing them to pull up short on a leg. Others commented on navigating by hillside "shelves" or on the well-generalized original map (no clutter from 0.9m boulders or shin-high cliffs!).

The area around Princeton Municipal Light's two 15MW wind turbines was remapped for this meet to reflect 2009 construction, and some areas of evergreen forest were re-mapped as white woods, reflecting the maturing forest. In addition, the map symbols and colors were updated to ISOM 2017 mapping standards. Since some symbols "grew" larger in size, a new "legibility checker" feature in the OCAD mapping software allowed each changed symbol to be checked to make sure it doesn't bleed-over into another symbol.

Other experiments included using waterproof paper ("Rite-in-the-Rain" brand, which Cascade OC has used for years without map bags in their notoriously rainy Seattle weather), a map flip for Red & Blue (a result of the course setter forgetting to check paper size before designing courses on this 12" x 18" base map), and printing enlargements to 1:5,000 scale for White & Yellow, and 1:7,500 scale for Orange & Brown courses.

We'd like to thank Massachusetts DCR and the Wachusett park staff for assistance in bringing a formal orienteering event back to Wachusett Mountain for the first time in 15+ years. The event also could not have happened without Jim Paschetto arriving early with equipment, masterminding the e-punch equipment and results, and departing near dusk with even more equipment. After completing their own long Red courses, Karen Yeowell & Mark O'Connell single-handedly pulled half of the 36 controls used for the event. Judith Karpinski stepped in blessedly to alleviate our registration back-log, and Tori and Anna Campbell set and pulled many controls.

The experiment's complete so let's not wait another decade-plus to enjoy the woods at Wachusetts!


View the splits here (courtesy of WinSplits). For the raw splits file, click menu Results>Raw Splits Files.

This event is available in RouteGadget (in the Results menu) — share your route, or just use the Splitsbrowser (click RG2 splitsbrowserin the Routegadget2 menubar).

White 2.0k 75m  
Name Club Time
1 Tor Webb CSU 21:33
2 Sebastian Ruiz NEOC 27:12
3 Carla Cally 35:37
4 Laura, Deana, Henry, Vivian 39:39
5 Anna & Pam Muncy 43:57
6 Murali Aryapillai 44:11
7 Isla Finlayson, Peter Campbell NEOC-MQ 49:11
8 Mark T. Reed 54:11
9 Janene Davis 78:56
10 Mark, Lyhthe, Luke, Alex 96:10
Yellow 2.3k 85m  
Name Club Time
1 Kevin Walsh 23:28
2 Elliot Walsh 27:34
3 Jessica Seem 28:11
4 Casey Seem 32:19
5 Lukas Webb CSU 34:30
6 Mark T. Reed 49:59
7 Anna & Pam Muncy 62:59
8 Sebastian Ruiz NEOC 63:42
9 Don Boudreau NEOC 79:15
10 Laura, Deana, Henry, Vivian 108:13
Janene Devis DNF
Orange 3.0k 110m  
Name Club Time
1 Jim Paschetto NEOC 50:57
2 Steve Fiedler NEOC 75:11
3 Suzanne Robinson NEOC 75:30
4 John Mitchell NEOC 76:59
5 Anna Campbell NEOC 77:36
6 Mori Finlayson NEOC 79:44
7 Monica & Tim Foy 92:10
8 Paul Loefstedt 93:51
9 Alan Chisholm NEOC 97:44
10 Will Spurgeon NEOC 98:49
11 Bob Latshaw +2 110:10
12 Gregory Khrapunovich NEOC 111:57
13 David Penfield NEOC 115:10
14 Dan & Jen Newman NEOC 117:25
15 Anna Morse WCOC 127:56
16 Tatiana Koudinova 136:27
Brown 2.9k 105m  
Name Club Time
1 Becky Carlyle NEOC 43:26
2 Rod Kichen 44:18
3 Trisha Underwood NEOC 70:39
4 Roger Underwood NEOC 75:36
5 Nancy Duprey NEOC 76:49
6 Dorina Nimigean NEOC 78:04
7 Judith Karpinski NEOC 83:14
8 Mike Jean +1 95:24
9 Bill Duncan WCOC 99:18
10 David Landrigan NEOC/CSU 103:44
11 Bridge Bordelon & Lupe USMAOC 106:09
12 Priya Landrigan NEOC 128:09
13 Anaka Landrigan NEOC 128:12
14 John Kernochan NEOC 137:39
Ann Jochnick NEOC DNF
Pia Webb CSU DNF
Wendy Johnecheck NEOC DNF
Jeffrey Tingle NEOC DNF
Green 5.3k 170m  
Name Club Time
1 Clinton Morse WCOC 77:55
2 Stephen Richardson NEOC 85:55
3 Bill Davidson NEOC 88:01
4 Tom Randall 110:24
5 Kelly Guarino NEOC 112:31
6 Jim Henderson WCOC 117:44
7 Tari Tan NEOC 123:05
8 Mark Webb CSU 124:54
9 Richard Nietupski WCOC 131:07
10 George Walker WCOC 136:39
11 Patrick McNeal NEOC 137:38
12 Maria Bloom NEOC 138:35
13 Pete Lane NEOC 139:49
14 Tetiana Husak 142:02
15 Jim Crawford NEOC 151:13
16 Tom Stevenson 154:53
17 David Yee, Adam Miller NEOC 160:25
Lyn Walker WCOC DNF
Red 6.9k 245m  
Name Club Time
1 Rick Keilty 91:07
2 Xavier Fradera NEOC 111:26
3 Mark O'Connell NEOC 120:13
4 Diana Todd QOC 127:55
5 Karen Yeowell NEOC 137:00
6 Zeke Millikon 156:51
Alex Vai NEOC DNF
Blue 8.2k 300m  
Name Club Time
1 Ari Ofsevit CSU 92:20
2 Jeffrey Saeger NEOC 97:20
3 Ernst Linder UNO 97:37
4 Alex Jospe CSU 99:11
5 Bo Nielsen NEOC 105:32
6 Will Daniels NEOC 108:05
7 Stephen Tarry UNO 114:22
8 J-J Coté LROC 115:48
9 Phil Bricker NEOC 122:43
10 Evgeny Remizov NEOC 147:37
11 Justin Wiley NEOC 158:43