Orienteering 1

All the happy hikers after completing the orienteering event.

For those who somehow missed all our social media posts about it, last Sunday was the premiere for our new orienteering event! =D

The setting is a foggy Bayreuth at 9 am. 19 people are gathered at the Bayreuth Hauptbahnhof eager to try out this new thing. After some back and forth regarding travel arrangements on our part we all arrive at the Feldensteiner Forst around 10am. It's a forest like any other around here. The weather has changed from foggy to sunny, 17 participants await instructions, somewhat unsure of what to expect.

Everyone listening carefully to the explanation of the game.

After an detailed explanation of everything involved from the coordinates list, the map, RFID cards, checkpoints and the scoring system they are ready to start. At 11 am they check into the first checkpoint and receive their coordinates. The clock has started. Now every team must plot their coordinates on the map and devise a strategy to gather as many as possible checkpoints within the next 5 hours.

Teams working fast and hard on getting all coordinates located on their maps.

The first teams had pinpointed their coordinates within 20 minutes and starting running. Every. Second. Counts. Just before the 5 hours were up the first teams started to come back, sweaty mind you. They went all in and ran or jogged most of the time to be able to gather all checkpoints which where spread out on a route af about 19km. Quickly all 8 teams were back at the starting point to collect the final checkpoint and find out how they did compared to the others.

Now it was time to crunch the numbers and find out all the statistics of the teams. The least amount of gathered checkpoints were a whopping 10 (we expected much less!). The winning team even managed to get all but one of the 16 checkpoints within the time. Half of the teams were within the time limit of 5 hours where the other were over it just by mere minutes. A tremendous achievement given the long distances between the boxes which had to be collected.

And lets not forget about the riddles posted with each checkpoint. The best teams got 10 out of 15 questions correct, and don't forget, to be able to solve a riddle they first had to find the boxes as well!

One of the boxes with the attached riddle hidden inside a pile of logs.

In the end, of course, there can only be one winner. And in this case it was team Eagle with a whopping 223 points. 175 for the collected checkpoints, 50 for correctly answered riddles and 2 points deducted for finishing 2,5 minutes after the deadline. Close second was team Alejandrei with 220 points and in third came team Cheebee with 185 points.

Team Eagle, winners of our first Orienteering event. Visibly exhausted from the 5 hours of running and searching for the boxes.

We like to give a super great thank you for everyone who participated and the great energy they brought to the event. It made the previous month of work all worth it! Also a big shout out to Mirna for helping with all the event preparations and Sem, Dionis and Simon for driving everyone to where they needed to be. Much love for all of you!
We will now rest a bit, but not for long since we will be doing this event again later this year. So stay tuned and in the meanwhile we'll also organize regular hikes on the weekends as much as our full schedule allows.

Last but not least, below you can find all photos of the event. Until the next time, happy hiking!
Love, the Bayreuth Mountain Club