Participants or teams will walk through a field and/or woodland course in a natural setting to a pre-determined skills station. At each station, the participants will be required to demonstrate their knowledge of map and compass skills by answering questions or performing certain tasks.
The Orienteering Skills Challenge will be conducted with the participants or teams taking a bearing with their compass, closing a shape, identifying map symbols, and defining orienteering words (examples: contour lines, scale, declination). The participant may be asked to identify how nature can give you different directions of travel (north, south, east and west, etc.). These situations can be used as well as many others in the Orienteering Skills Challenge (not to be announced before the program).
Each participant will be asked to answer 10 compass bearing or other related map and compass orienteering questions, each worth 30 points for a correct answer and zero for an incorrect answer. The Orienteering Skills Challenge has a possibility of 300 points.
Only compasses can be used on the Orienteering Skills Challenge Course and will be furnished by the sponsors - Silva, liquid-filled Pathfinders. No orienteering books, encyclopedias or other written, taped or transcribed material can be used in this activity. Also, no talking is to be done between the participant and instructors or other participants while on the course. The information for this event has been taken from the NRA's The Hunter's Guide, Be An Expert With Map and Compass Orienteering Handbook by Bjorn Kjellstrom, and Finding Your Way With Map and Compass Orienteering by John Dinsley. To obtain these two Silva Compass publications, contact Johnson Camping, Box 966, Binghamton, NY 13902.