A beautiful early October day guaranteed a stellar attendance at Prospect Hill. From the waiver sheets I counted 190 people participating and that doesn't count a number of scouts and scout leaders. The weather was perfect (sun, no wind, nice temperature…). The town of Waltham is upgrading this swath of woods this year. Previously the top of Prospect Hill has been cordoned off by a fence because of a radar installation. That fence is now gone, as is the radar. There are still some antennas used by the Waltham police and a radio club. The shelters in the park are being rebuilt, trees have been cut down in order to offer beautiful views of the Cambridge Reservoir at Route 128 and of downtown Boston. The official NEOC map is now even more out of date than before. A couple of years ago Daphne and Joel Gould updated the map and their map was used for this meet together with even more updates accounting for removed fences and logged areas.

I have never received so many e-mails before a meet. Some of these were from new people that wanted to learn about orienteering and some of them from different scout groups that wanted to participate in the meet. I think our web site makes us more visible to people since a lot of new people clearly got their information from it. True enough there were a number of new people at the race. With our new policy to give the race for free if people signed up for membership we generated 25 new memberships.

The courses seemed to work well. This year I avoided to take the Orange down on the other side of the Hill. That downhill (and especially subsequent uphill) can be quite challenging and moreover the map isn't 100% correct on the slope itself. That made the Orange a little more challenging to put together in order to get enough distance. Bob Dangel vetted the courses and gave some valuable suggestions to make the courses better.

Everything went smoothly. The only mishap was that somebody running the Yellow course got the orange clue sheet, but he happily completed the course anyway.

The meet was also visited by the press. Sara Newbury from the Portsmouth Herald is writing an article about orienteering. She was shown what orienteering is all about by Tom Baldwin who took her around the orange course.

Thanks for all the helpers that made this meet a successful one:
Marcia Steere and Dave Kehs at registration, Denis Struble and Evan Deardorff at start, Tom Baldwin at registration, instruction and press handling.
Also the whole Fleming family: Caroline, her husband and their children Siobhan and Ceire that handled the finish and the results.

And a special mention: Peter Frykman who ran 3 races: Orange, Yellow and White.