Petrified Forest Rogaines
2026

EVENT DETAILS

Event Headquarters: Rainbow Forest Museum Parking Area (inside the south entrance of the park)
The event headquarters are inside the park. There is a fee to enter the park. "America the Beautiful" and other national park passes are accepted. Click here for more information. Please consider carpooling to minimize the cost to enter the park.

Update: Sunday, October 11 (2026 Updates):

• Packet Pickup:
  Friday, 6:00 to 8:00 PM at Motel 6 in Holbrook (See the List of Preferred Accommodations for directions to the Motel 6.)
  Saturday, 8:00 - 8:30 AM at Event Headquarters (Rainbow Forest Museum Parking Area)
  Sunday, 8:00 - 8:30 AM at Event Headquarters (Rainbow Forest Museum Parking Area)
  


• Event Headquarters - Rainbow Forest Museum Parking Area, Inside the South Entrance, Petrified Forest National Park
  (Directions to Rainbow Forest Museum parking)
  
  • Participants must check-in at Event Headquarters each morning between 8:00 and 8:30 AM.
  • The pre-race briefing, including map distribution, starts promptly at 8:30 AM.
  • On Saturday, we will transport participants to a start location immediately after the pre-race briefing.
    On Sunday, we will walk from event headquarters ~1.5km to the start location.
  • On Saturday, the remote start is located at the bus drop-off point.
  • On Saturday, we will transport participants back to the Rainbow Forest Museum Parking Area at the end of the event.
    On Sunday, the finish is at the event headquarters.
  • Note: Full toilets are available at the Event Headquarters (Rainbow Forest Museum Parking Area). No camping is available inside the national park. See the List of Accommodations for information about camping and other lodging possibilities in the Holbrook area.
  • We will have emergency portable camp toilets available at the start locations on both days. We will not provide a full port-a-jon at the start locations. We highly recommend you take care of business at the toilets at the Event Headquarters (Rainbow Forest Museum Parking Area) before you go to the start.


• Transportation to Event Start Locations
  
  • The start/finish location for Saturday's event has no parking for participants. We will use two 14-passenger school buses and a full-sized school bus to transport participants from the event headquarters to the start location on Saturday. On Sunday, we will walk as a group ~15 minutes to the start location.
  • The pre-race briefing, including handing out maps, starts promptly at 8:30 AM at Event Headquarters (Rainbow Forest Museum parking). The buses to the start location on Saturday will leave at approximately 9:00 AM.
  • Note: Because of the number of participants at this year's events, we will make multiple trips to transport all participants back from Saturday's finish location. We should be able to get everyone to the start in time for a single mass start at 9:30 AM. On Sunday, after the pre-race briefing, there is a 1.5 km walk to the mass start location.


• Saturday Night Meal
  

  We have arranged for a group gathering at the Roadrunner Roost inside Holbrook High School. The site has tables and chairs for us to meet from 6:00 to 8:00 PM Saturday night. We'll provide pizza, drinks, and snack for participants. We'll ask for a donation, maybe $5 per person, onsite. We'll send further details in a group e-mail.

Due to participation limits inside the national park, pre-registration and pre-payment is required.
Regular registration is open until Sunday, October 4 at 11:59 PM. Late registration ends on Tuesday, October 13 at 11:59 PM.

The fee for the Petrified Forest Rogaines is $30 per day per person. Those who sign up for both days receive a $10 discount. Late registration (after Sunday, Oct 4 at 11:59 PM) is $40/day/person. Registration closes Tuesday night, Oct 13 at 11:59 PM.

DESCRIPTION:

Please join the Greater Phoenix Orienteering Club and the Tucson Orienteering Club as we present two days of orienteering events at Petrified Forest National Park in eastern Arizona. On both Saturday, October 17 and Sunday, October 18, 2026, we will offer a 4-hour event called a "Rogaine" in which participants navigate on foot using only a map and compass to different locations within a designated area. Participants are allowed to visit as few or as many locations as they can within the 4-hour time limit.

Our orienteering events at Petrified Forest National Park offer an excellent opportunity to practice your navigation skills while at the same time exploring an incredibly beautiful and unique National Park. Petrified Forest National Park has offered us an excellent and rare chance to practice our sport inside a National Park. We hope you'll take the opportunity to join us and discover this amazing national treasure.

NOTES:

Pre-Registration: (Pre-Register ), (Reg List ) Pre-Registration is Required! Petrified Forest National Park does not allow any money exchange within the park. In addition, there is a strict limit to the number of competitors the Park is allowing for our events. Because of this, pre-registration is required for the events using our on-line registration site.

Registration/Fees Because of the pre-registration requirement, we use an on-line registration site to help with the registration for the Petrified Forest Rogaines. Fees for the events are set on a staggered scale to encourage you to register early. (Early registration helps when it comes to printing the maps!) The entry fees are the same for each event and are per participant. Individuals who wish to compete as part of a team still must register and pay individually. We are allowing individual participants as well as teams of 2-4 individuals. If you would like to compete as a team, we ask that you include the name of your team in the "Notes" box of the registration screen.

• Regular Registration: Register by 11:59 PM Arizona time on Sunday, October 4. The regular registration fee is $30 per person per day. A $5 discount each day is applied if you register for both days ($50 for both days.)
• Late Registration: Register by 11:59 PM Arizona time on Tuesday, October 13. The late registration fee is $40 per person per day.
• Onsite Registration: We are unable to offer onsite registration.
  We're sorry, but in order to meet national park rules, we must close registration the weekend before the events. There is also a strict limit to the number of participants we can invite. Please help us by registering early.
• Refunds: We regret that we are unable to refund registration fees after registration is complete.
• Electronic timing: We are not using e-punch. The two events will use a manual punch system. The registration form requests that you enter an e-punch number or check a box to rent an e-punch card. Please ignore the e-punch requests on the registration form.

Parental Consent Required (Click here for more information)
All participants under age 18 are required to have a signed parental consent form on file with the club. You must complete the form before the event and either scan it and send it to us by e-mail or regular mail.

Packet Pickup
There are several opportunities to pick up your packet.

• Friday, 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM in the courtyard at Motel 6 (List of Preferred Accommodations)
  
• Saturday, 8:00 AM to 8:30 AM at Event Headquarters (Rainbow Forest Museum parking)
  
• Sunday, 8:00 AM to 8:30 AM at Event Headquarters (Rainbow Forest Museum parking)
  

EVENT HEADQUARTERS

The Event Headquarters is inside the south entrance of the park, at the east part of the parking area around the Rainbow Forest Museum. Please note, this IS NOT at the Visitor Center. We will conduct a pre-event briefing each day at 8:30 sharp, followed immediately on Saturday by bus transport to the start location and on Sunday by a 1.5km walk to the start. Please plan your travel time accordingly.

Carpool to the Events
Because of the fee required to enter Petrified Forest National Park, we suggest participants find a way to carpool into the park. Participants could meet outside the south entrance to Petrified Forest National Park, then carpool to the Event Headquarters at the Rainbow Forest Museum parking. There is plenty of parking just outside the south entrance to the park. There is a fee to enter the park. "America the Beautiful" and other national park passes are accepted. Click here for more information. If you carpool, you can save on the entrance fee.

ACCOMMODATIONS

There are a number of options for accommodations in the Holbrook area. The lodging options includes deluxe and standard motels, RV sites, cabins, paid camping, and free camping. You can click on the List of Accommodations to see the places we have used for lodging in the past. We appreciate everything the local Holbrook businesses have done to help with our weekend of orienteering fun.

RESTROOMS

Full flush toilets are available at the event headquarters at the Rainbow Forst Museum Parking Area. The restrooms are next to the museum building at the west side of the parking area. On Saturday and Sunday, we'll provide an emergency camp toilet at the start locations. On Saturday, we'll provide an emergency camp toilet at the finish location. There are restrooms available on Sunday at the finish. Please note that the terrain throughout the national park is barren. There aren't many places to find privacy.

MAP AND TERRAIN

We will provide 3 maps for each day's event:
(1) Overview map - Tabloid size paper, 1:20000
(2) Map 1 of 2 - Tabloid size paper, 1:10000
(3) Map 2 of 2 - Tabloid size paper, 1:10000

The maps do not use the standard brown color for "open terrain". Instead, we use white to represent "open terrain" to avoid wasting ink when printing the maps. While the maps do not meet the standard for high-quality orienteering maps, we promise we'll only place controls on easy-to-see mapped features. For those of you who love running in the forest, you've come to the wrong place! The unique landscape in Petrified Forest National Park is very rugged and very barren. You'll get to explore a badlands of rocks, gullies, cliffs, and most of all, petrified wood! We have specifically chosen sites for the controls which will take you through geologic layers with some of the heaviest concentrations of petrified wood in the park. You will NOT be disappointed!

Please note, vegetation is sparse. Many areas have no vegetation. These areas are completely runnable. Other areas are covered with patches of short grass that will definitely slow you down. We generated the vegetation symbology using NDVI on 4-band satellite views, not from lidar. Terrain covered with the short grass has a higher NDVI index than open land and is shown as rough open on the maps. A few green areas on the maps represent thicker vegetation (more photosynthesis). In ~30 square kilometers of maps, you'll find a green tree or two, but not many.

Also note that the maps have black blobs representing cliffs and steep earth banks. These symbols do not meet standard orienteering symbology, but they do give a good idea of areas difficult or impossible to cross. The cliffs were generated from lidar we just discovered is now available for the park. We did little field checking, so we can't guarantee the accuracy of the black blob cliffs. There are unmarked cliffs throughout the maps. We suggest if the little brown lines on the maps are really close together, you avoid crossing the area.

COURSE NOTES

• Water: We'll have one manned aid station on each day's course. The stations are manned by a volunteer with radio/cell communications back to the finish location. The manned control will also have first aid, drinks, snacks, and maybe even a cot to lay down and take a nap. We want these events to be as safe as possible. We hope you'll all plan to visit our manned controls to help keep our volunteer entertained.
• Punch System: We will use standard manual controls. This means you will record your visit to a control by punching a control card using the punch attached to the control bag. We will NOT use electronic punching. For some of you, this is a throwback into prehistoric times, which is somehow appropriate with all the petrified wood laying around you. We hope you're not too disappointed that you won't be able to use the fancy SportIdent card you just purchased.
• Map Distribution: We'll hand out maps at the mandatory pre-race briefing at 8:30 each day. On Saturday, we'll then transport participants to the start location. On Sunday, there's a ~1.5km walk to the start. By handing out maps before the starts, we're helping to ensure you don't bother us during the drive or during the hike to the start locations. The mass start begins each day at 9:30 AM pile-poil. (French)

Additional Notes Mandated for Events Inside the National Park:
• In the event that human remains and/or funerary objects are discovered during the activities, all participants must stop and the park archeologist/NAGPRA coordinator contacted immediately. All provisions outlined in the outlined Native Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) will be followed.
• Participants must attempt to traverse the activity via washes, game/social trails, or ridges as much as possible. Participants may not cut or carve stair steps or handholds/footholds in high grades on in-situ Triassic rock/soils or modern unconsolidated sediments.
• Participants will be educated on the appearance and general location of biological soil crusts. Measures to mitigate the loss of biological soil crusts at the activity sites will be identified and finalized during the design phase. Measures may include closing areas within the project or moving points to other places.
• Participants will follow “Leave No Trace” principles while conducting field activities.
• All participants will be provided archaeological stewardship information and will be informed of the penalties of illegally collecting artifacts or intentionally damaging any archeological or historic property.
• If unknown paleontological resources are discovered during the activity, access to that location will be stopped until the resources could be properly recorded and evaluated by park staff. Measures must be taken to avoid further resource impacts or to mitigate their loss or disturbance.
• Activity leader and participants must inspect all packs, gloves, etc. to make sure they are free of plant parts, especially seeds, prior to entering the park, in order to prevent the spread of non-native species. Pay particular attention to boots, socks, and packs.
• Archaeological site ethics documents are to be shared with all participants through the organizer. Through additional shared documents, participants will also be informed of civil penalties under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act for removal and/or damage to cultural resources.

AWARDS/CATEGORIES

We will present awards to the top 6 finishers overall as well as the top 3 finishers in each class: male, female, and team. For purposes of the Petrified Forest events, a "team" consists of two to four members.

SCHEDULE:

FOOD:

WHAT TO BRING:

• Whistle (Mandatory for all. Available for purchase for $1)
• Compass (Mandatory for all. Available for rent for $1)
• Water. There will be water at the start/finish. We will also have one or two water stations on the course. However, you are strongly encouraged to bring your own water bottles or a camelback.
• Sun screen. There is little or no shade on the course.
• Sturdy hiking shoes and long pants are recommended. You won't encounter a lot of vegetation but there is a fair amount of loose terrain.

CONTACT INFORMATION: