About The Greater Vancouver Orienteering Meetup

Introduction to Orienteering

About the Sport

Orienteering involves making your way across country, using a map and compass to navigate as you stroll, scramble or run. It is a sport which combines both physical fitness and quick thinking. Events are timed, and usually you must navigate around a loop course, reaching specific ?control? locations along the way. At each of these ?controls? you must check in, using either a punch or an electronic timing device, in order to prove at the finish that you navigated successfully to all control locations in the correct order. Events are held on a variety of terrain types, from city parks to extensive wilderness areas.

You can choose at what level to pursue this intellectually and physically challenging sport. You can easily modify your approach as your skills and fitness develop. Orienteering can be a competition among elite athletes, a hiker?s or jogger?s quest for a ?personal best?, or a map and compass exercise for families, youth groups and schools.

Participants are from a broad range of ages, making orienteering an ideal life sport or family activity. Courses of different lengths and levels of technical difficulty are available at most events, so participants of various levels of fitness or experience can all be challenged.

Navigation with map and compass is a skill best learned by doing, so come and try a local event with the Greater Vancouver Orienteering Club. Besides the exercise and fun of the event itself, you?ll gain new skills that will serve you well in adventure racing or for wilderness travel. You?ll soon be ready to try a larger orienteering event in the spectacular open country of the BC Interior.

The Orienteering Map

Orienteering maps are very detailed; they are usually at a 1:10,000 or 1:15,000 scale, and include topographical features, such as contour lines, depressions, and knolls. Streams, lakes, trails, boulders, cliffs, buildings, and similar features, recognizable while traveling on foot, are all shown. For a list of all symbols, please see a sample map legend. Also, please see a sample map.

The Orienteering Course

The start of the course is marked with a triangle on the map. Control locations are shown by a circle, and the finish is shown by two concentric circles. The start, the controls, and the finish are all joined by lines indicating the order in which the controls must be visited. A course normally has between 6 and 15 controls, depending on its length and the type of event.

The Orienteering Event

There is usually a registration area at each event where you register for a course. At larger events, pre-registration is required. Compared to other sports, orienteering is a very low-cost activity. Entry fees for events are usually not more than $10 for smaller events and $15 for larger events. See our schedule of events to see what event fits your schedule.

WET - Weekly Event Training

Evening event every Wednesday at 6:30pm, in various locations around Metro Vancouver. A headlamp is used during Winter months when it is dark.

Getting Started

Pick an event and see if there is further event information online. If not, contact the contact person for that event to get more information. For events in city parks, either running shoes or trail running shoes are ideal. Compasses can be rented at our events.

Membership

There are many benefits to becoming a member of GVOC. These include reduced rates at all GVOC events. For membership information, please see the membership page. Full membership includes a subscription to O Canada, The Canadian Orienteering Federation Newsletter.

Questions?

Please see our website