orienteering at highlands forest

I spent most of this weekend at Highlands forest, just outside Grabouw, setting up and running a orienteering event for the Cape Town based Peninsula Orienteering Club. Highlands is amazing, with awesome views of the mountains in the distance, and the ocean down to Hermanus. Lots of small streams and marshy bits, but a little rough when it comes to terrain. Lots of rocks and tree branches all over the place. It makes running, and walking, pretty hard.

Anyway, we were lucky, we had awesome weather and clear skies on saturday, while we were putting out the controls, and sunday while the event was on. A very enjoyable day for me, but there were some (valid) complaints about the courses. Some lessons learnt, like don't hang a control at the bottom of a pit.

I also got to do a bit of running and orienteering while putting out and collecting controls, I tried to approach each control from a different directions to practise my map reading, and got some of them very wrong a few times. The area is really pretty tricky.