Shawnee Mission Park has a permanent orienteering course with 75 control points.  For $3.50 you can get a packet at the visitor’s center that contains an orienteering brochure, a black & white map of the park with all control points, location hints, and a color map on which you can draw your course (make copies before marking it up!).

For my second orienteering outing, I decided to do the hard course suggested in the packet: 11 points that basically circumscribe the entire park.  It’s about 4.5 miles point-to-point, but of course you can’t actually go directly point-to-point so the real distance is greater and much of it is off-trail.  It took me about 4.5 hours (walking).  I had trouble finding two of the markers but I was in the right area so I guess I actually have some clue what I’m doing.

I saw parts of the park I had never been in before so that was pretty neat.  The most interesting find was the “free ride” mountain bike trails.  I had seen some discussion online about trying to start this project a while back and then promptly forgot about it.  Those guys have been very busy building some pretty amazing stuff!  There’s sure to be some bones and bikes broken there when it opens.