By Daniel Šebo
Preliminary course details:
Course Length Climb Controls
Beginner 2.3 km 90 m 19
Advanced 4.4 km 240 m 31
Beginners should be aware that the lengths shown are the cumulative straight-line distances between controls. Your actual distance will be somewhat longer. To estimate how far you might actually go, mentally change "km" to "mi" (e.g., for a "2.3 km" course, you might travel up to 2.3 miles).
The difficulty of the Advanced course is actually somewhere between intermediate (Orange) and advanced (Brown, Green, ...). The name is mainly to distinguish it from the Beginner course, and to identify it as the Summer Series ranking course. The course is doable even for only slightly experienced orienteers, since there are always trails within 100 meters of you.
Important note for the Advanced runners: There will be a map exchange at some control in the course. You will simply flip your map over, and the second map will be on the other side inside your map case. One map will show all the controls from the Start to a certain control, and the second map will show that "certain control" and all the controls from there to the Finish. This is because the park is relatively small, and some controls and control lines would be extremely hard to read.
Note: The Advanced course requires a high-capacity fingerstick, because it has more than 30 controls. The rental E-sticks are high capacity. Make sure your personal E-stick has adequate capacity (see here for reference). High-capacity loaner E-sticks will be available for people with low-capacity E-sticks.
Hazards & Other Information
There is some poison oak in off-trail areas and sometimes on the sides of trails. It is not as bad as in most parks in the Bay Area, and since it doesn't grow in massive clumps, it is usually quite easy to avoid. Most of the poison oak I have encountered in this park grew lower than my knee. There is one section on the Advanced course where you may choose to go through some vegetation and clearings where there is a bunch of poison oak plants. There is no good way for me to map this (since it grows so low), so you can't tell from the map that it is there. However, in all other parts of the park it is rare and easily avoidable.
Some people choose to let their dogs off-leash in this park, so be mindful of that. All the dogs I have met there are extremely friendly, but one can never know.
One extremely important note: The naturalists in the park have asked us not to go off-trail through certain gullies and out-of-bounds areas. These areas are marked on the map by special pink lines and the classic out-of-bounds hash. Please be careful to observe these areas, and do not pass through these areas off-trail, or we may not be able to orienteer here in the future. However, it should not be very hard to avoid the out-of-bounds areas. Each time a course goes through a gully, a control will be placed on a trail crossing to force people not to pass through the gully off-trail.