Map Snippet Scavenger Hunt

Do you have little portions of maps that are two small to use for most exercises? Or perhaps you are like me and didn’t have time to create an exercise and print it off? This was precisely my situation for Wednesday’s practice. I had leftover maps from a previous training exercise which had a small unused section in one corner, so I decided to do a scavenger hunt.

As the name would imply the athletes hunted for 5 controls hung on various features in the terrain using their blank maps to help them. When they found a control, they had to circle its location on the map and fill in all the columns of the blank control description. Because the area I used was quite large (500m x 1000m) and relatively detailed, I told them which features the controls were hung on and that the controls were all on different features. That meant that one of the controls was really easy (there was only one pit on the map) and one of the controls was very difficult (there were tons of boulders).

One could argue that this exercise isn’t really very good training because we don’t orienteer by randomly running around looking for controls (at least not if we are orienteering well 😉 ). Actually, this exercise practices several important skills:

1. peripheral vision broadening focus
2. looking at the terrain and landforms much like a map walk
3. relocation when they have to draw the control circle on the map
4. writing control descriptions
5. running – the athletes (mostly) happily ran around for the entire session

I also like the added advantages to the coach of requiring very little preparation.

A variation on this exercise would be to use a very small detailed area and not give any clues. This would make the exercise almost a variation on a Micr-O.