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Night orienteering
1 Oct 2023 11:55 pmThe night orienteering competition - only a competition for fun, and not really serious orienteering - is an area tradition where the different chapters of our charity take turns hosting and the other ones send volunteer teams from their associated organizations to compete in an orienteering scavenger hunt in the forest that lasts all night.
I mean, it did sound like fun, but by the time I heard it would last all night and was estimated to contain a minimum of 9 km of walking I already knew saying yes had been a bad idea. It was fun! And we got lucky with the weather: it only rained lightly a little bit, and there was a full moon and it stayed around 12° (54 F).
But I was only really having fun until about 2 am, so I think that a 4-6 hour challenge that finished by 1-3 would probably be the best. I definitely wouldn't do it again. However, our team were all first timers from the first aid group and the board, while most of the other groups were experienced with orienteering and the other sub-groups of the volunteer search and rescue corps. So I can see that this model might be ideal for that crowd.
We got a brain teaser with a locked chest, basic timed exercises in first aid, fighting forest fires with the volunteer fire fighters, and bomb disposal (?!), quizzes on fishing and tracking and the local wildlife, and a timed challenge to fry pancakes over a fire pit at around 2 am. The final challenge was five minutes to build a fire that burned to a certain height (50 cm) for a minute or two, using stuff gathered from the woods on the way, but we were allowed to use the stuff we had brought with us and two of us had papers, fire starters, and a lighter, so that wasn't hard.
The volunteer fire fighting stuff was lots of fun, and so was orienteering off trail in the forest at night, albeit it could have been nicer if we'd been less tired and not under a time constraint. And we met five different dogs!
I mean, it did sound like fun, but by the time I heard it would last all night and was estimated to contain a minimum of 9 km of walking I already knew saying yes had been a bad idea. It was fun! And we got lucky with the weather: it only rained lightly a little bit, and there was a full moon and it stayed around 12° (54 F).
But I was only really having fun until about 2 am, so I think that a 4-6 hour challenge that finished by 1-3 would probably be the best. I definitely wouldn't do it again. However, our team were all first timers from the first aid group and the board, while most of the other groups were experienced with orienteering and the other sub-groups of the volunteer search and rescue corps. So I can see that this model might be ideal for that crowd.
We got a brain teaser with a locked chest, basic timed exercises in first aid, fighting forest fires with the volunteer fire fighters, and bomb disposal (?!), quizzes on fishing and tracking and the local wildlife, and a timed challenge to fry pancakes over a fire pit at around 2 am. The final challenge was five minutes to build a fire that burned to a certain height (50 cm) for a minute or two, using stuff gathered from the woods on the way, but we were allowed to use the stuff we had brought with us and two of us had papers, fire starters, and a lighter, so that wasn't hard.
The volunteer fire fighting stuff was lots of fun, and so was orienteering off trail in the forest at night, albeit it could have been nicer if we'd been less tired and not under a time constraint. And we met five different dogs!
