Holy O-maps, batman: check out
the Rocky Mountain Orienteering Club (RMOC)'s master meta-map. It shows
all the orienteering maps in the Rocky Mountain area and has links to the real orienteering map and courses! I spoke with the RMOC leadership over Christmas (I was visiting family out in Denver) and commented that there was no repository for this kind of info; they said they had been considering some sort of public portal for o-maps and . . . 7 months later, they've got an awesome resource for Denver area orienteers. Way to go RMOC! Next time I'm out there I will certainly be checking some of these places out. I should probably sign on as a RMOC member just to support all their good work!
Too bad Denver is a 4+ hour plane ride away.
Closer to home, I remember talking with some
Quantico Orienteering Club (QOC) leadership this winter and they didn't sound very interested in sharing their maps online in this fashion. The maps represent a lot of intellectual capital and are a valuable resource for the club; the QOC tightly controls who has a copy of the QOC maps.
Is there really a black market of orienteers itching to print
boot-leg copies of a JPG showing the o-maps in the Washington DC area? I understand where the QOC is coming from, and I respect all their hard work, but maybe
paying members of the QOC could get access to the kind of resource the RMOC has developed.
Heck, I'll even volunteer to do the web page showcasing the QOC maps and do any other leg work. Maybe they need to go to a "pay per copy" model where you can order the maps online and get them emailed to you (or, gasp, snail mailed if they're worried about digital duplication . . . but high quality scanners are easy to come by so even a hard copy isn't safe from duplication). Again, I'll volunteer to put that sort of thing together for them.
On a related note, the local
orienteering advocates at Encompass-Adventure just circulated
an interesting link showing the same terrain on a USGS topo map vs a "true" orienteering map. The differences are significant and represent a lot of painstaking work by some orienteering mappers. I know Shawn Callahan (of Encompass) put in some hard work on
the New Quarter Park O-map we used at the Rogaine a few weeks back; thanks again Shawn!
Maybe we'll start the
Orienteering Hampton Roads O-Map repository with the New Quarter map when Shawn finishes it?