Thank you to all who braved the favorable weather today at the 2025 edition of the St. Louis Orienteering Club’s Holiday O’ Meet!

Livelox: https://www.livelox.com/Events/Show/176818/Broemmelsiek-Holiday-2025

After a blast of early-season snowfall swept through the area region early Saturday morning, our Thanksgiving O-meet was forced to take an unplanned pause. With the snowfall leading to Cuirve River State Park’s temporary closure, this meant a last-minute rescheduling or the meet was required. Thanks to all the flexibility of our participants and volunteers, we were able to regroup Sunday morning and enjoy a crisp, bright day of orienteering through a winter wonderland. 

Results

Thank you to everyone who came out and competed on the rescheduled date. Congratulations to all finishers—conditions were still soft underfoot, but that didn’t slow down some impressive performances.

Acknowledgments

A meet like this is only possible because of amount of behind-the-scenes effort. A big Thank You goes out to Mark Geldmeier for his numerous quick communication updates and overall guidance, Derek Hebda for spending many hours in the woods meticulously verifying the course to ensure everything on the map matched the ground and Ken Debeer and Jim Huss for clearing the course. 

We look forward to seeing everyone at the next event—hopefully under calmer skies.

Thanks to Jeff and Carrie Sona for putting on a great event at Cliff Cave. And a shout out to Brian Rodenbeck for helping with everything from setup to control pickup. It was a pretty simple event, two hours to find as many of the CP’s as you could. Sounds easy. But the numerous depressions, sinkholes, and meandering trails can easily get you turned around. I’m sure everyone had the experience of dropping into one of the depressions confident the orange/white flag would quickly be spotted…only to find…nothing, Boo! But at least there were snacks, candy, and friendly conversation at the finish. Hope everyone had a great time!

After showers and thunderstorms the day before, we awoke to bright blue skies and cool temperatures. Arriving at the park, we were concerned about the “hunt in progress” signs, but orienteering participants are an intrepid lot, and everyone went out anyway! (the hunt didn’t start until the next day).

It was so much fun to see all the excited faces! Thanks to everyone that came out. Hope you had fun playing in the park full of varied terrain and so much history. A special thanks to Anne Schrupp for running the registration. Thanks to Jeff Sona, Carrie Sona, and the Washington High School cadets that helped put up banners and organize the registration table. Thanks to Brian Rodenbeck and Josh Borgmeyer for control pickup.

It was a warm and wonderful evening of orienteering in Kirkwood Park. Our hard working volunteers welcomed a mix of returning regulars plus many new bright-eyed faces to the sport of orienteering. We had a tremendous turnout of over 160 participants this year, almost doubling our normal volume. Thank you to all who joined us and navigated with curiosity and excitement. Your energy lit up the night! A big thanks to our SLOC and family volunteers who took the increased volume in stride. My apology on any map delays and on control #23 being on the SE corner of the lake instead of the SW corner of the lake. We hope to see everyone again next year for this annual St. Louis Orienteering Club classic! ~Mary Piper(Frei)

Preliminary Results:

Thanks to all of you, 80 racers over 38 teams who toed the line at the inaugural CC4 Adventure Race. On behalf of SLOC and the race directing team that put this event on, we are very grateful for your participation. Prelim results are posted. If you see any discrepancies, please report them to us at contourline@stlouisorienteering.org ASAP.

A few housekeeping notes. I’ve created a shared Google drive with pictures. If you have photos, please send them to me by email and I’ll get them posted. We also have several items in the lost and found that are pretty nice. Two Kanpas compasses, two more compasses, a pair of Prana pants, sunglasses and a waterbottle. This stuff is all in the gear box we bring to the meets so if you are the owner of these items please reach out or show up at the Kirkwood Night O scheduled for September 13th. There are several nice items in there from the Babler O meet earlier this year and other stuff along the way.

If you have any feedback for us, please share that too. While the race directing team has participated in countless ARs and put on many O meets, this was our first go at this type of race and as we contemplate both our near-term fall schedule and the 2026 landscape, we’d like to know what you are interested in seeing. And, we are always looking for volunteers to help with our regular meets so if you want to give back to the community and take the a lead, or even supporting role, in directing a race, we’d love to have you.

Many thanks and congratulations to each one of you!

Attached is a more detailed set of results with timing from each leg for those who want to go into a little more detail.

Livelox: https://www.livelox.com/Events/Show/164603/Marquette-HS-2025

It was one of the most humid evenings of the summer, but that didn’t stop the 20 intrepid participants from roaming around the pond and lake covered landscape of August A. Busch Memorial Conservation Area. A big thank you to first time meet director Jessica Heupel! She had the idea of putting on an event here a year ago, and we helped to make it a reality.

The event was a one-hour score-O event with 25 CP’s of varying point value. It wasn’t possible to get all of them within an hour, so you had to plan what you thought would be an optimal route and then adjusting while biking down gravel roads. Thanks everyone for coming out and having fun!

Thanks to all who came out and braved the heat, and the jungle gym, for what turned out to be a good evening in the park. Also….. sorry for pushing the bounds of the clue/circle on #4. I am not sorry for making you all climb the jungle gym though. See the results below:

Livelox tracks: https://www.livelox.com/Events/Show/162018/Lafayette-Park-Sprint-2025

Group Score-O:

Individual Point to Point:

Group Point to Point:

The tornado of May 2025 passed through the western and northern portions of Forest Park, toppling or damaging nearly a thousand trees. Meet Director Bryan Niehaus designed an orienteering event that respectfully recognized this tragedy by using only the rootstocks of fallen trees for the check points.

Course options were a shorter point-to-point course with 15 CPs, or a longer “farsta” format course. A farsta is when participants start together and cover the same distance, but there are multiple loops, and each person does the loops in different sequences. Thanks Bryan for the summer fun!