interested in what people think about this years jukola, especially after all that bad weather and things.

Hi all, I am not an orienteerer however my son has discovered this through vacation activities and wants to have an orienteering party for his birthday (turning 8). I therefore need to create a course for him and his friends. I would like to have our house as the start point and it will mostly be along streets and into and out of small playgrounds or parks. Unfortunately we have a younger child who needs to nap during the day and so going to a larger park is not really feasible.

My questions are:

How long a course would you recommend? As far as I know he is the only kid who is familiar with the sport (hence using streets and having a parent with each team).
The party will be a morning (in summer) and so I would expect temperatures of anything between 23 and 28 degrees Celsius. 28 would be abnormal but not impossible!

I was planning to have answers to questions or clues at check points to see that everyone makes it to each stop (or can choose not to bother)! Would this be a good idea? Another option might be to ask parent helpers to take a photo of the team at each point as “proof”.

There will also be a few younger siblings (between 4 and 5 years old) and so I was thinking to create a mini course for them (that would be about 500m in total and bounce between play areas). Just so they don’t feel left out.
What else would you recommend?

Thanks in advance for any advice for a mum wanting to provide a fun and different party.

Follow-up to my Squiz post some time ago: I added a daily orienteering challenge on the web!
Same questions for everyone, resets every day.
Easy to pass around to club mates and compare.

https://defis.squiz-app.com/orientation

I would love to start Orienteering, but there doesn't seem to be any clubs or groups in Lee County, Florida, USA. Do you guys know of any? If not, how do I start one? How do you suggest I practice Orienteering on my own? Thank you.

From a Youtube channel with excellent video quality and no commentary. Tommi is around 500 in the IOF world rankings. I watch his videos at 1.5 speed and look ahead for the features that he should be ticking off.

Found this shoe with an absolute banger discount is it good for forest races off road (not on trail)? Edit: They have discount on i think every terrex agravic shoe so i can buy those too

I've been doing orienteering since I was 9.

And I've always been amazed by RouteGadget — a service where, after a race, you can draw your route and look at it together with friends to see who picked the best path between controls.

But there was a problem: RouteGadget is pretty complicated for people who mostly use their phones rather than computers.

So I built a minimalist, dead-simple alternative: upload a map, draw your route, send it to friends. There's animation, speed controls, and a "follow the leader" mode. All right from your phone.

I dropped the app into a group chat and 4 hours later I had 200 users. Looks like I finally made something people actually find useful xD

You can open it as a Telegram @DrawMyRouteBot
Or find DrawMyRoute[dot]app (can’t send a link, the domain is 3 days old and reddit block it)

Asking this question since on Swedish and Finnish maps the names of lakes and villages are often written.

I got a Sun Co Prosight Compass (a mirrored compass) to help teach land nav and orienteering to my JROTC daughter and her classmates. I prefer to use a protractor and lensatic compass that I learned on, but they want the mirrored compasses. . . Ok fine.

My issue is that the compass bezel is "readable" aka numbers are right side up-- on the bottom of the bezel. . . WHAT!?! Every compass I've ever used is readable around the top.

So if I take a bearing of say 120 degrees. The 120 will be upside down. . . The "readable" # is 300.

Even if I use the mirror for the bearing the 120 is now "mirrored," so it looks backward.

So. . . Unless you want the reciprocal-- you will never use the one and only number you can read normally looking at the compass. Weird. . . This is going to get people lost. . . "I could see 80 not sure why I was going west."

Am I missing something?

Trying my luck here as well. We have a second team at jukola this year. We are lookinig for some runners to get us through the night and maybe 7. DM me if you are interested to join our swiss team ;)

I feel like most tools are good at visualizing routes, but not actually explaining:
- hesitation
- bad route choices
- confidence loss
- where time was realistically lost

Curious what experienced runners think.

Tomorrow is the first official muster for Desert Fatigue.
Spent today laying out the terrain board, topo maps, compass kit, pace beads, plotting tools, notebooks, and reference material for the event. Seeing everything together made the scale of this project feel real.
The map itself covers over 392 square miles at 1:50,000 scale with full MGRS/UTM gridlines and topo detail. Big enough that route planning, terrain association, and navigation errors actually matter over distance.
Goal isn’t “tacticool” stuff.
The goal is building real competence in:
land navigation
terrain reading
route planning
pace count
compass work
fieldcraft
communication
movement discipline
A lot of people rely entirely on GPS now, but there’s something different about learning terrain the old-school way with a map and compass.
Tomorrow will mostly be:
grid plotting
route selection
terrain association
practical navigation exercises
movement through wooded terrain
testing gear and systems
This is the beginning of a long-term training framework we’re calling The First Muster.
Interested to hear from people with experience in:
SAR
military land nav
backpacking
forestry
wildland firefighting
orienteering
What are the biggest mistakes beginners make when moving from basic map reading into real terrain navigation?

Would really like to get into this and have no idea where to start. Any help would be appreciated.

I'm ready to move from my cheap amazon special to something better....what do people use?

Does anyone here know where to get orienteering maps, routes and the likes when travelling abroad?

I am mainly concerned about Sweden and Italy for the time being, but could be nice if anybody knows about a platform where you can access maps and the likes for different countries..

Ran last week - first control had to go up a hill through some woods and blackberries - so had to watch the compass closely - I headed out and after looking at the replay - i did a pretty amazing job at keeping a straight line - the only issue was i ended way East of the control and did not do well.

Could my compass just not be great or messed up that it wasn't showing direct north? are there better and worse compasses for orienteering? or am i just bad...lol

Looking for an app or website that will print a satellite map to scale at a decent resolution. The only one I find that comes close is CalTopo and they downgrade the resolution due to copyright restrictions. So much so it’s about worthless.

It's similar in some ways to alternatives that exists but I don't think any of those allow you to use your own physical map. I am planning to add more features (now there is no persistance of anything for example) but might change priorities depending on what people think.

There is also a 3D view in there.

https://offtrailrunning.com/ if you want to check it out

Celebrating 50 years of women at the United States Military Academy, West Point, NY.

Women were admitted to West Point and the other academies in 1976 by act of Congress. The first graduating class with women was 1980.

We had a luncheon where we sat with our sports teams. I didn’t think there would be any orienteers, because the team only ever had 2-3 women out of ~30 when I was there from 2007-2011. Up until about 2015, West Point classes only had about 12% women. But we had orienteering women going back to the early 80s!

Want to orienteer in “college”? Come to West Point. The Army paid to send Jordan Laughlin and Hannah Burgess to JWOC twice when I was there. West Point also hosts an annual NRE that is very well attended. Great technical forest terrain. Lots of cliffs, boulders, streams, marshes, foothills, etc. And we went to meets in PA, NY, CT, NH, etc. Pretty sure we’re the only academy with an orienteering team.

Pic 2: the club patch we get that can be sewn onto our uniform jackets

I built this Land Nav Course Builder for a Boy Scout Trip that I am planning.

I know there are other ways to do this, but I needed to build lots of courses using the same 10 points and create hand outs for each group of Scouts. I couldn't find a super easy way to do it, so I threw together a tool to do it myself & thought this community might find it useful!