Maps

Working with a Cartographer

Orienteering cartographers are available for hire.

Orienteering USA has a great program to connect schools and youth-serving organizations with orienteering cartographers. They even provide grants to cover up to half the cost. For more information, please see our OUSA Youth Mapping Program page!

Making your own map

Standard orienteering maps

There is an international standard for orienteering maps, ISOM for normal forest maps, and ISSOM for sprint maps. There is even a school map standard, which is a variation of the spring standard. You can learn more about map standards here.

There are two specialized programs for making orienteering maps: OCAD and Open Orienteering Mapper. The latter is free and open source, and works quite well.

To get started, cartographers use LIDAR data, aerial imagery, Open Street Map data and Strava tracks to show where trails are. LIDAR data is laser return data from a plane flying over the area, and provides very accurate data on the elevation of the land, as well as the vegetation. 

Some good references:

• Getting started with orienteering mapping: an introduction (British Orienteering Federation): short and sweet. This and the next are by David Olivant (Nottinghamshire Orienteering Club)

• Generalization and Clarity (BOF): an excellent short description

Orienteering USA has a program to help schools and youth organizations make maps - you can find out more here (https://orienteeringusa.org/resources/ymp/). They also provide grant funding to cover up to half the cost. Typically a map may cost a few hundred dollars to create. For tips on the application, check this page.

Any map is fine to get started

If you don't have a regular orienteering map, any map will do to get started teaching kids. Your school may have a map of the grounds. You can use an aerial image from Google Maps as is, or use it as a starting point to trace a symbol map to show the location of the buildings, fields and paths.

Isometric (picture) maps

An isometric map is a picture of the space that preserves lengths. We draw these either by hand or by using SketchUp. Here are examples:

Drawing courses on maps

Once you have a map, you will need to draw orienteering courses onto it. 

• You can draw a course by hand directly on a printed copy of the map with a red or purple permanent marker.

• We recommend Purple Pen, a free Windows program that will draw the course on a map. The starting map can be any PDF, or a file in the format saved by OCAD or Open Orienteering Mapper. You can download the Purple Pen program here.

• You can use programs like Google Slides or Powerpoint for creating the circles and lines to represent a course.