Kangaroos and Engineering: Rogaine

... and no, I don't mean the hair-loss product.

This weekend I went to Rydal, a small town in the Blue Mountains (about two hours or driving), with the UTS Outdoor Adventure Club for a rogaine skills workshop. Rogaining is a great outdoor sport, kind of like competitive orienteering, where small markers (a sheet of paper with a number on it) called "controls" are scattered throughout an area of bush and teams are given a set amount of time to use a compass and map of control locations to find as many as they can. Different controls are worth different points; rogaines can be anywhere from 2 to 24 hours long.

We were camped at the Rydal Showground with about 30 people from all over New South Wales. Over the weekend we had some classroom work on map and compass work, distance pacing, route planning, and basic strategy; we also went out on 4 short rogaines in the State Forests nearby. Our first was Saturday morning for about two hours, where we were split into groups of 5 with a guide - it was basically a practice session. That night we did a night rogaine (two hours again), which was a lot of fun. My flashlight wasn't particularly good, which made finding controls difficult, and it was harder to navigate based on landmarks when you can't see farther than a few meters, but it was good experience. Once time was up, it was time to make our way back to the Showground for tea and biscuits before climbing into our tents for the night.

Sunday morning we were up bright and early to go at it again, this time in a different forest. We saw quite a few wild kangaroos hopping around, usually running away from us when we came over a ridge. After that it was back to the showground for lunch and then our final two and a half hour competitive rogaine (no more guides, and this time the points count). We split up into teams of two; I was with a man named Rob who had done a few rogaines before (which meant he saw no problem with plowing through the thick bush down into and back out of steep gullies - it was a great hike). We ended up not doing as well as we had hoped after failing to find (and then spending too long looking for) two high point value controls, but it was still a lot of fun.

The landscape was amazing - and the stars even more so. It was like looking at the night sky in the Appalachian Mountains, except that the stars were completely unfamiliar. Really amazing.

While we were rogaining I tended to have a map in one hand and a compass in the other, but Rob had his camera out and got these shots of our group on the Sunday morning rogaine:

The Rydal Showground, with a daffodil field (we camped in an open area off to the left)

This is the basic terrain on this rogaine - thin trees and dry grass, with the occasional kangaroo

Our guide, Paddy, who showed us the ropes (and then tested us by taking our compasses away - really makes you follow the terrain rather than a bearing)

On the drive back to Sydney, we decided to make a short stop in the Blue Mountains (on a different part of the trail that I'd been on a few weeks ago) to see some amazing cliffs: