DARK PEAK NEWS Winter 2012 - Dark Peak Fell Runners

Dark Peak News Winter 2012 page 20Rugged Outdoor Group Activity Involving Navigation and Enduranceaka RogainingEnjoyed Dave Holmes’ Burbage SummerSharpener series? Well it’s maybe time to tryRogaining.The object is to score points by findingcontrols located within the mapped area. Sojust like Dave’s events you get a map and ploton it a series of controls that have variouspoints values, and then you have 24 hours,(I did say it was a scaled upped version), tocollect as many points as possible. You needto carry enough food and safety equipmentfor the 24 hours as any support is banned, soalthough you don’t have a tent etc, the rucsacis still fairly heavy. The real killer is that theonly Rogaine event in the UK is always heldin the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland.As we were to discover, the Wicklowsis an area of outstanding beauty thatAndy Harmer has designed in his dreams.Everyone else would have nightmares overit - you know, endless bog, tussocks, heather,bracken, rocks, crags, no trods as even thesheep are afraid of venturing too far intothese hills. The going is tough, to say theleast. At 2pm around 30 teams, includingones from South Africa, Germanyand Belgium, were handed the controllocations and point values. As you needto run as a team of two or more, Tim andI had joined up again after a long breakfrom mountain marathons.We marked up controls that coveredthe entire Harveys map of the WicklowMountains, so it was clear that no-onewas going to bag them all. We werealmost last to leave and headed throughthe forest and out onto the vast moors.At the first control there was a bigchoice. We decided to head into the centralarea, blissfully unaware of what the groundwas going to be like. We were going strongand despite the ground made good progresswithout seeing anyone else. We looped backto pick up another control and again headedback into the wilderness rather than takethe longer but faster road section. This wasa big risk since it would be dark soon andwe had a very tricky, high scoring control tofind before then. It would be impossible inthe dark as the last attack point was over amile away. Relying on our years of ‘warting’we made good progress in fading light andgathering mist and found the small re-entranton a boggy hillside. Phew!Head-touches on, Tim now blazed thetrail and we relaxed and started to eat oursupermarket pasta, yoghurt, bread andhummus during our only short road section.As it was July it was only dark for a fewhours and we ticked off the controls in goodorder. A key to good Rogaining is choosingthe best section to do at night and we hadTypical Wicklow landscape, endless tussocks!