Buckeye Hills: Long-O, Score-O, Adventure Race
Results
Saturday, January 9, 2021

Less than 24 hours before our Buckeye Hills events, we discovered that our efforts to obtain insurance for the navigation-by-bicycle part of our events were not yet finished. With no insurance, we were forced to cancel the bicycle part of our events. Instead, with maps already created, we offered a "Long-O" option that took participants through a slightly expanded area surrounding Buckeye Hills. We're happy to say that we recovered from the last minute change without too much impact on our particpants.

For the adventure race, we typically send partipants out on a bicycle course then follow with a foot orienteering course. This time, we gave partipants both maps and allowed them to find as many destination markers, in any order, in the 5-hour time limit. The controls on both maps were actually in the same general area so it was probably more efficient to visit all the destinations on foot. Andy Wentzel and Cameron Ferguson were the only two to visit all destinations on both maps. Our friends from Flagstaff (Amber Tinstman, Bella Naughton, and Kevin Adams) also traveled to most of the destinations. Special recognition for "Most Improved" goes out to Team PIP. Last month, for their first ever attempt at one of our events, they were able to find one of the destination markers. At Buckeye Hills, they visited 22 destinations. We hope with a little practice they'll become contenders at any navigation event.

Mike Zampino was the only participant to visit all 27 of the controls in our 4-hour Score-O event. Coming in close behind was Hollon Kinney who visited 23 destinations. Hollon made an age-related excuse and suggested we have some type of handicap system for future events. We had a tight finish for 3rd place with Jaclyn Taylor, Steve Willman, and Peg Davis visiting a similar number of controls. In our 2-hour event, Erik Ringnes edged out Brian Durrell for the top spot. Fehmi Eren and Gary Hickey were close behind. Gary actually visited the same number of destination markers as Erik, but Erik's route took him to higher point-value destinations.

We had a total of 38 particpants in our Score-O events. Everyone enjoyed the mild January weather (~68F) and interesting desert terrain around the Buckeye Hills Regional Park. We thank park officials for allowing us to stage our event in the park. We also thank everyone who attended our Buckeye Hills events. Our biggest payoff for the work we put into staging orienteering events is your participation. Thanks to Dan Yamashiro for all he did to set the courses, to Jeff Brucker and his family who drove 3 hours just to help with control retrieval, to Shane Lacanienta for his help advertising and documenting our events, to Glenn Haselfeld who helped with control retrieval in spite of a bad tendinitis in his foot, and to all our other volunteers. We hope to see everyone at a future event.