By Steve Gregg
Welcome to Point Pinole! I made the original map of this park over 20 years ago, and we have held local meets here almost every year since then, but this is only the second time we have used the park for a National Event. It is probably BAOC's flattest forested map, and should be a welcome change for those of you who have run on our steep hills. The map is printed at 1:7500 scale, with 2.5-meter contours.
The park has an extensive trail network, and you will never be more than about 100 meters from a trail on any course. Nonetheless, navigation can be challenging here, especially when running at top speed. The park is full of point features, both manmade (pits and ruins), and natural (lone trees and rootstocks), and your main challenge will be to navigate accurately to these features.
Although I am no doubt biased, I believe the map has held up well over time. I have worked hard to add newly fallen trees to the map every year, and many of their rootstocks will be used as control points. These rootstocks are marked as brown ×s on the map, and if the fallen trunk is long enough to be noticeable (which is the case more often than not), the trunk is mapped with a brown line extending out from the brown ×. Finally, in a few cases enough vegetation has grown up on and around the trunk to warrant mapping it as fight, in which case there is a strip of green on top of the brown line. I believe all of this will make complete sense in the field.
If you ran on this map when it was first made, but have not been here for a few years, you will definitely be surprised by the amount of poison oak you will observe. The White, Yellow, Orange, Brown, and to some extent Green courses have been designed to steer you clear of the worst of it. But on the Red and Blue courses, there will definitely be a few legs where you will be treated to the sight of some impressive patches of the stuff. Unless you are sure you are immune to poison oak, I strongly recommend full leg and arm covering on all the advanced courses. It will not be possible to avoid brushing up against at least a few isolated ankle- or knee-high stalks, no matter how careful you are to avoid it.
My vetter (Gary Carpenter) and I have worked tirelessly this last month to find and map any poison oak patches that have grown large enough to be relevant for navigation. The tall, impassible patches have been mapped as dark green fight, and most of the fight that you will encounter in the forested parts of the map are poison oak patches. These poison oak patches are easily avoidable, and you might even find some of them to be helpful for navigation. However, please do not assume that all the poison oak patches you might encounter in the terrain are on the map.
The other type of poison oak that has been mapped are a few areas of knee-high stalks, which are dense enough to be noteworthy. These areas have been mapped with the green-striped, undergrowth symbol. They can be run through at close to full speed, but runners who are sensitive to poison oak might not want to do that. There are not many of these areas on the map, and the courses have been set to completely avoid the most extensive areas, but you should be aware of what that symbol means on the map, since it is somewhat non-standard.
I hope you have a pleasant day of flat, fast running! In the past, the best Blue course runners have been able to run at 5 min/km pace in this terrain, and although the vegetation is definitely thicker now than it was back then, I still expect to see some very fast times.