2025 Beaverton Metrogaine Score-O

The 2025 Beaverton Metrogaine went well with ideal weather and a good turnout for our first year of hosting events. To provide a different center for this Beaverton event, we used our garage as the event center which provided ample space for our operations and a shady shelter for the post event social. We were set up for 2-, 4-, and 8-hour score courses but ended up with only 2- and 4-hour participants (one team registered for the 8-hour course but did the 4-hour course when they realized that they didn’t have any competition on their  preferred course).

On the 4-hour course, Del and Erik Scharffenberg easily won first place with 1210 points, Kevin and Aiden Liddiard came in second with 860 points, and Laura Weller came in third with 810 points less 240 for being 6 minutes overtime.

On the 2-hour course, Mike Holliday easily won first place with 440 points, Jacab van Baalan came in second with 180 points, and Scott Drum/Mike Poulsen came in third with 210 less sixty points (150 points) for being 2 minutes overtime.

As always, we also had a Kidd-O course for the youngest participants. This course went around our home grounds with short legs but controls that were often out of sight until participants came up to them. It was essentially a short yellow course, and it was our first course to use our new control flags and hole punches. About one fifth of our event participants did the course and had fun with it.

On the metrogaine courses, we had one control (#28) that was misplaced in an inaccessible area thanks to a mapping error. Four competitors/teams visited that control and spent time looking for a control that could not be reached. Fortunately, MapRun shows the amount of time that they each spent looking in vain for that control, so I subtracted that time from their finish times. In one case (Scott Drum and Mike Poulsen), this correction changed their placing from 9th to 3rd. For the other, participants, it did not change their placings. In all four cases, my apologies for not fully fixing that problem control before the event.

One other control, #1, was not recognized by MapRun as being a control with a point value. I suspect that the problem might have been the single digit used for the control number. The point value was correctly set in Purple Pen. In any case, we looked at all the results and added ten points to the five competitors/teams that visited that control. This did not change any of the placings.

The post event social was a great success thanks to the cooking and baking done by Kathleen Kerns. We had a white chicken chili, black bean soup, cranberry granola bars, deluxe trail mix, oranges, and bananas that were all made in quantities to satisfy any calorie-depleted competitors at this event. Lots of competitors stayed around to share the food and their experiences with others. Our thanks to Mike Poulsen who made sure that everyone was back (we had two late finishers) before leaving in case help was needed to find them.

Now to build for our next event at Silver Falls State Park on the last Sunday in June. That will be our first technical navigation event with seven courses using our new electronic punch system. Set your calendars and bring your friends!

Tony Pinkham