Mini ROGAINE at Camp Stem by OLOU

Start of the meet

This past Saturday, we packed up the family and headed to our first family orienteering meet with OLOU. It was held at  Camp Stem, a girl scout camp, in Southern Indiana - about an hour away from Louisville. OLOU was offering a 2 or 4 hour mini-ROGAINE event with 2 starts - 9:30am or 11am. ROGAINE stands for "Rugged Outdoor Group Activity Involving Navigation and Endurance" so a perfect event for our family to have some fun while getting our 'fit in'.

Control Point

We arrived a little after 9am. Ryan got our family registered for the 4 hour one. The meet cost only $10 for our family. We received our map with the 30 check points already on the map and our control card and stick which are used to mark the control points we find. We had a briefing prior to starting to go over the map. The topographic map was old so the trails were not as reliable. Also one checkpoint was worth 3 points instead of 1 because of the location and difficulty. The night before a post was made in the OLOU facegroup page about the easiest check points that would be great for beginners and/or families with young kids like us. In this meet, we were able to go in any order we wanted.

Learning how to read the map

We packed our bags with water, food, first aid kit, and kids and started the race. We followed trails and creeks, made our own way through ravines and uphills while trying to stay in contact with our map using the compass to locate the next control point. Our oldest found the first couple of checkpoints since he was leading us. Near the end, our middle son found them since he had a pretty good view from the backpack that he was riding in while my husband carried him. Our boys had fun trying to find the checkpoints, but they also enjoyed just seeing everything in nature. We found a really cool turtle shell. The boys tried their hands at trying to catch frogs. I was able to practice my orienteering skills which led us through some tricky parts that everyone did great traveling through. Fortunately we did not encounter any snakes which my boys would have loved to have pointed out! Just about everyone found a tick crawling on them, but that is too be expected going into the woods for an adventure.

We were out for 3.5 hours and found 13 control points. By the end, everyone's fun bucket was getting full as we were getting tired. The meet was well run with friendly people.  I found it a bit harder to navigate as compared to the MISSION LITE from last weekend because the trails in the woods were hard to follow. We saw the markers on the trees occasionally, but the paths on the ground were pretty much non-existent. Looking at the map for features such as re-entrants and spurs were more important in this meet. Despite losing Pixie's pacifier and one water bottle, we had an enjoyable time and got a great hike carrying 2 of our kids through most of the course.

Hiking through a creekbed

Pixie enjoying her first meet