Mapper’s Notes (the notes below were written for a previous event some years back, and have updated for the 2023 Laramie Daze)
The 6 maps being used for this 2023 event are either new (The Forest of Little Hope, South Granite, Sugar Hill) or a mix of new plus re-mapped earlier mapping (Aspen Meadows, Area 307), or existing with only very slight updating (Remarkable Flats.)
All the maps are in granite terrain, and while there are areas of rather bland, completely open grasslands, most of the maps include areas of complex to very complex rock detail, including bare rock, scattered small rock, and boulders and cliffs of all sizes. In the most detailed areas, and especially on some most detailed hill tops and rocky ridges, it has been necessary to heavily generalize the detail to show the most significant features while retaining an acceptable amount of legibility.
Almost no boulders under 1m have been mapped. The exceptions are generally very isolated boulders that are especially eye catching.
Nearly all dot knolls are pieces of rock protruding through the surface of the ground and these rock dot knolls all have been mapped with bare rock (which may be hard to see on the map depending on how far the gray extends beyond the brown dot). From various angles dot knolls and boulders may strongly resemble each other. The rough guideline is: if you can easily run up onto the piece of rock in question from at least one side, it’s a dot knoll. Some dot knolls mapped are quite low, and well under 1m. Many dot knolls will show one or more sides with a cliff added, but sometimes these cliff faces have been omitted even when prominent, for reasons of legibility.
If you haven't been orienteering on our Laramie Range maps before, at first it may be hard to see the difference between what is mapped as a dot knoll versus what is mapped as a boulder, but the mapping is actually quite consistent and you should be able to quickly figure out what is what and how these features are mapped.
Cliffs generally need about 2m of near vertical face to make the map.
The forest on these maps is mostly ponderosa pine--often sparse or very scattered--with areas of aspen groves. The aspen groves are generally compact with very clear edges, have almost without exception been mapped as light green, and are often highly visible features, and quite good to navigate by. As elevation gets higher, aspen tends to grow in a noticeably less compact and distinct manner and becomes less useful for navigation. This difference comes into play on both the Forest of Little Hope and Aspen Meadows maps.
Even though the vast majority of aspen areas have been mapped as light green, the interiors exhibit a range of actual forest density, ranging from areas that are nearly white (open forest) to areas that feature very slow running (usually because of fallen or partially fallen trees. There are some smaller areas of mature aspen that are so open it is really impossible to map them as anything other than white.
The ponderosa pine forest tends to be quite open in nature without continuous canopy except in denser stands found mostly on north facing slopes. This means these pine forested areas will often have a very mottled white and yellow mixture of colors, and the difference between full white, open forest and areas of more scattered trees with varying amounts of rough open or open ground can be quite subtle. The pines have been hit hard by pine bark beetles in recent years and in some smaller areas numbers of dead trees have started to come down. Where larger areas of fallen trees exist to the point where they were worth mapping, they have been mapped with tight green vertical lines (very slow running, good visibility). There are many smaller areas (think house sized) that are difficult to traverse because of fallen trees, but which are generally easily avoided by looking ahead in the terrain.
Generally speaking, on all the newer mapping most dead trees and areas of dead trees have *not* been shown as forest or mapped, except where they limit runnability, and are then mapped as rough open, rough semi open, or with vertical green lines. On the one older map (Remarkable Flats) areas of dead trees from beetle kill will still be shown as areas of white open forest--but hopefully the course setter has avoided the bad areas.
Relatively few distinct trees have been mapped as such, but all the maps include large amounts of individually mapped trees mapped as small white circles (copses) in areas of yellow and small irregular shapes, mapped to canopy size. They can be quite useful for navigation, while at the same time not obscuring contours or other important details and can be ignored when not needed.
Some of the maps show small circles or ovals of dark green (fight). In marshes these are invariably clumps of impassible willows. On dry ground, these are almost entirely distinct clumps of compact vine maple; these may be used as control features.
Rough open consists nearly entirely of areas of sagebrush and bitterbrush. The borders of most areas of rough open tend to be indistinct, to some extent impressionistic, and usually not useful for fine navigation. Rough open areas may contain some amount of scattered saplings (usually ponderosa pine.)
The new mapping done in the past two years was all done from lidar bases, and at 1:5000 scale. In hindsight, use of that larger scale made it too easy to take details that are very hard to make legible at even a printed map scale of 1:10,000, and especially on the new Area 44 (307) map, there are areas of extreme detail that are very difficult to make any sense of. These areas will not be used for control locations and will not be necessary for map reading when following logical route choices.
Mapping is hard to do well, very time consuming, but very easy to criticize. That said, I always appreciate hearing comments from racers, both pro and con, about my maps. Useful feedback leads to better future efforts.
--Mikell Platt