Eastern Washington Orienteering

Orienteering is a sport in which participants use an accurate, detailed map and a compass to find brightly colored markers placed in the landscape. It can be enjoyed as a walk in the woods or as a competitive sport. Typically, the control points are supposed to be found in a particular order. There are variations, such as “Score Orienteering” events in which people compete to see how many control points they can visit in a set amount of time, in any order they choose.

Our events are very low-key. At most events we have a novice map course set up for people to just get the feel of how it all works. As you get the hang of it, you can try longer courses where the controls are more challenging to find. The feel is a little bit like a very small fun run. You’ll meet people out for a stroll in the woods as a family, and people that have been orienteering for decades and are challenging themselves to run a course as efficiently as they can.

We stagger the start times so that every participant (or group/family) gets to have a similar challenge of running their course without just following someone else. Normally there’s a two-hour window within which it’s okay to show up and register for a start. After you’ve registered and prepared your map let the starter know, and he or she will assign you a start time probably within a minute or two. If you’re new to the sport, will need a little longer to prepare your map, or figure it’s going to take you a long time to finish your course, try to show up toward the earlier side of the time range. It makes the day a little shorter for the volunteers, since they can’t start picking up controls from any course until everyone has returned from it.

The best way to learn is to ask questions at the club events. We're making an effort to have people available during the start times of events to answer questions and give a little instruction.

Once you have the basic idea of navigating around an orienteering course talking to other participants is a great way to learn more. It doesn't sound like sophisticated advice, but it's often surprisingly helpful to see how other people have dealt with similar puzzles. If nothing else, it's fun to chat about our various successes and failures.

Most of our expenses are related to the events we host. At almost every venue we pay the landowner fees of between $25 and $250. The permits we get always require that we have liability insurance, which we get through OrienteeringUSA at a cost of $2 per "start."

Although orienteering isn't equipment-intensive, the equipment is expensive. Our new electronic punching equipment costs about $140 per control and requires lots of other infrastructure to work with it.

The rest goes to the little expenses like office supplies and website hosting. As a 501c3 organization, everything we take in goes back to the furtherance of our club’s aim, which is almost entirely: to host orienteering events.

Membership is $15 per year for an individual or $20 for a family. Our Treasurer, John Beck, is at almost all events and can sign you up. You don’t have to be a member to participate in any of our events, but membership saves you a couple of dollars per event and helps support our club.

You can mail a check to the following address:
EWOC
PO Box 944
Spokane, WA 99210

Orienteering is mostly about map-reading, but a compass does come into play. Don’t go out and buy one right away, though. The club has appropriate loaners you can use during our events. Hiking compasses will be totally fine for orienteering. As you gain orienteering experience (and talk with other experienced orienteers) you'll see that there are many ways to use a compass. The more a compass is designed for competitive orienteering, the less features it will have that are useful for hiking. In the end you might choose to buy a single compass that strikes the right balance for you between orienteering and any other outdoor activities you do. If orienteering becomes your main thing, you might want to look into a "thumb compass."

A GPSr can tell you exactly where you are in the world, but not where our orienteering controls were placed. Where it might come in handy is as a learning aid. After an event you could look at your tracks and see how efficiently you navigated each leg of the course.

Sure! Ask at the registration area of an event and we’ll probably have something you can help with. Even if we already have a timer, he might want a break so he can go do one of the courses. Most of the time at the end of an event we could use someone to pick up control markers. Setting courses takes a little bit of training, but if you’re interested in doing it, we could get you started working with someone who has experience in it. Just let us know at an event or use the contact page.

Here are the clubs surrounding us:

• COC — Cascade Orienteering Club in the Seattle Area
• CROC — Columbia River Orienteering Club in the Portland, Oregon area
• GrizO — Grizzly Orienteering in Missoula, Montana
• CTOC — City of Trees Orienteering Club in Boise, Idaho
• GVOC — Greater Vancouver Orienteering Club in the Vancouver, British Columbia region
• KOC — Kootenay Orienteering Club in Rossland, Kimberley, and Cranbrook, British Columbia