On Saturday, Feb. 11, several youth from Boy Scouts of America Troop 288 and Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles Troop 7161 participated in the Youth Orienteering Meet sponsored by the Los Angeles Orienteering Club.

This year’s meet, scheduled annually on the second Tuesday in February, was held at Schabarum Regional Park in Rowland Heights.

LAOC’s Youth Meets offers kids the chance to try their hand at this unique sport, which requires a combination of map skills, compass reading, accurate route choice and navigation, hiking and cross country running.

For some in the group, the day served as an introduction to the activity, while others had participated in as many as five previous Youth Meets. At Saturday’s event, participants faced two separate race challenges.

In the first, teams of two or three received a map with 10 marked controls that they were to locate in sequence as quickly as possible using landmarks, map notations and their compass as their guide. Courses and controls were set for different age and experience levels, ranging from white-12 (beginners, age 12 to 13), white-14 (ages 14 to 18), white-open (for adults), yellow-14 (intermediate, ages 14-18) and open (adults) to orange-open (highly experienced youth and adults). In the second event, called Score-O, teams had one hour to locate as many controls from all of the challenge courses as possible, collecting points for each control located. Award winners for this year’s event included Ethan Gates and Lucas Martos-Repath, who placed third in the white-14 event, and Pete Sherpukdi and Trey Sambar who placed fifth; Matt Bomar and Charles Pingry placed fifth in white-14 Score-O.

Contributed by
Lyn REPATH-MARTOS