Capertee National Park – a masterclass in course setting.

After 20 years rogaining I am finally putting pen to paper on my first ever ‘blog’ to congratulate the organisers/setters of the NSW Championship held last weekend at Capertee National Park.
The weather was perfect, warm but not hot, and apart from the occasional spikey acacia and blackberry bush the forests understory allowed easy travel. Occasionally needed to scramble up steep slopes but nothing overly difficult The creeks were also relatively fast travel and we avoided wet feet crossing the Capertee River.

The course required careful navigation with controls generally set on subtle features.
The Australasian Champs held at the same location in 2015 had controls located on creeks or ridge/spur lines providing relatively easy navigation. The 2024 map, generated from LiDAR date sets, provided more accurate detail allowing the setters to place controls on more subtle features often with no obvious attack point thus requiring careful navigation.

With the mantra of ‘no mistakes’, Ted and I managed to find every control we attempted. The high point was finding Control 82 at night. The description was ‘The gully’ but we would call it, in hindsight, at best a slight depression. We were careful on picking a line of attack and pace counted until convinced we had overshot the control we turned back on the same line and every 25 metres separated and walked laterally in the opposite direction for 50 m. Our second traverse located the control.

Control 24 should have been easy to locate in daylight but we made an embarrassingly basic navigation mistake. From Control 60 we followed the spur down to the Capertee River. We thought we were just east of the control at the obvious 90 degree bend in the river at A. In fact we were at B at the next 90 degree bend. The creek leaving the river at the bend should have alerted us to our error. We finally orientated our map showing our 90 degree error. Normally I would automatically check the compass bearing on a creek or river line – but this was too easy!

The event was very well organised, the map top quality and the setting by Andrew and Tony one of the best I have experienced. Well done everyone involved in the event.