An Overview
POCAR (Purdue Outing Club Adventure Race) is an annual event held by the POC (Purdue Outing Club). It is an orienteering race taking place over Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, an auspicious time of the year in Indiana. The event occurs in a state forest or state park somewhere in Indiana; the location changes each year. There are two divisions: Collegiate, limited to current Purdue students, and Open, with no restrictions on affiliation. Willingness and ignorance appear to be the sole requisites to participate.
The race starts Saturday at 10am and ends on Monday at 10am. Each team of 4-6 racers is given a topographic map of the area and 10 points, composing the first of three legs. Each point is a set of coordinates that locate a flag (Appendix 1). To complete each leg, each point must first be located on the map, traversed to, and tagged. Then, the coordinates of the next leg are provided. Once a team tags all points in all legs, they complete the race. To contextualize the reality of our expectations, last year, only 2 of ~50 teams completed the entire race, only one of which was in the collegiate division. There are tales of a student falling into a river while pole vaulting over it, amongst other urban legends that are part of POCAR lore.
An Introduction to the Characters
I, Jordan, discovered the POC in the fall of 2022 but did not have a team to compete with at the time. I put my name in a hat to be drafted by unfilled teams. I was invited to join the ranks of a team christened the Flightless PoCrows, which was composed of the following illustrious individuals:
Lauren, the team captain, a sophomore in engineering,
Dan, friend of Lauren through classes, a junior in UX design,
Aditi, friend of Lauren through bouldering, a freshman in engineering, and
Andrew, also a friend of Lauren through bouldering, also a freshman in engineering.
A Prologue
I was aware from the beginning that I had the most hiking and orienteering knowledge of the team, but I was unsure by what margin. Were these unknown entities novices who expected a short jaunt in the woods, were they well-disguised Lewis and Clarks, waiting to traverse the Rockies? The large number of Patagonia fleeces was a reassuring sight; that indicated at least a familiarity with the most common outfitting shops.
We packed my Acura wagon to capacity on Friday night before making the two-hour drive down to Morgan-Monroe State Forest. After picking up an inordinate amount of Clif bars in preparation, we arrived after sundown and struck camp. I was impressed with the aptitude with which my teammates put up their tents; this was promising .
Our spirits were somewhat dampened by the miserable overnight weather: a low of 26° induced a most bleak attitude, particularly when combined with the characteristic slate-gray overcast Indiana winter sky. I believe I heard the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi telling me to visit Dagobah before I collapsed into my sleeping bag. Upon my morning rescue, I pushed the Tauntaun carcass off and began the thankless task of making breakfast. My work was received with the expected grunts of vague praise; instant oatmeal is a meal not known for its culinary influence (at least, outside of the land of Guinness and potatoes).
A Promising Start
Headquarters (HQ) held a meeting leading up to the starting pistol going over the ground rules of the race: Tag all points, the points within each leg need not be done in a particular order, you must let us know before you leave the park and quit, a cannon shot will announce the death of a team before they are hoisted by net out of the arena, etc.
Upon the acquisition of the Leg 1 coordinates, we made quick work of plotting and routing. We isolated 8 of the 9 points into three connected loops; one of them, L6, was close to HQ but not near anything else. We identified it as a “gimme” and set it aside for last.
Tagging the first two, J15 and Y3, proved to be nearly textbook navigation. I had spotted a ridge connecting the two for easy navigation; this got us within visual distance with hardly any effort.
Following this initial success, we got A7, D1, and Fire Water station North (FWN). A7 and FWN were also simple, and we chatted with race volunteers at the station during our meal break. They were impressed with our approach and goals for the weekend, and wished us good luck on our venture. In retrospect, this marked the high point of our arrogance and experience.
D1 must have been set by a particularly sadistic volunteer, as it was placed off the trail behind 50 yards of shoulder-height thorn bushes (Appendix 3). While none of us had succumbed to the fashion icon of zip-off cargo pants, enough of us were in jeans to make it through without too much damage.
My teammates readily picked up the necessary orienteering knowledge of map reading and compass skills, despite their earlier self professed trepidation. Dan in particular had a good head for keeping our bearing and reading the nearby geographic features. Trekking at a moderate pace but merrily making good headway, the mile counter ticked upward as the day passed by.
A Swift and Bitter Realization
One peculiar quality of the Earth is its roundness. While oft-debated, this feature and its regularity is acknowledged and the consequences of its patterns are typically accounted for.
Typically.
For an unknown reason, the slow creep of the horizon went unnoticed until it was nearly upon us. We were many miles from HQ and our campsite, but still had one more planned flag to locate. We had plotted it and were confident in our heading, arriving at its assigned ridge by headlamp.
While the daytime temperature was in the low forties, another well-received trait of the sun is its emission of heat. While most of us had been quite comfortable in merely a hoodie, the gloaming forced the addition of several layers. Not an insurmountable environmental hazard, but it certainly dampened our spirits.
If the weather was a dampening, what followed was a veritable deluge of negativity that would shatter mainmasts and swamp the decks. As mentioned, we were nearly upon the last scheduled flag of the day, all we had to do was search the roughly football sized area of a grid square (Appendix 4) for it.
It is difficult to convey the utter fruitlessness of our searching for the next two hours, but I would compare it most to Sisyphus contained in a hamster wheel. We wandered up and down the same slope countless times, completely losing our orientation.
With darkness closing in and boreal winds flitting about the dense underbrush, we rediscovered the same small pond multiple times. As we pondered our fate while gazing into its murky depths, striae of ice slowly emitted from the surface piercing detritus.
During our mucking about, another team came and went, tagging the flag right under our nose. Our gyrations took us into overlapping paths within this time period, but it took another team coming with veritable spotlights before we finally spotted the flag (Appendix 5). Tucked across a gully, we had walked within 20 feet of it several times without realizing.
After this humiliating defeat, we trekked in awkward silence back to HQ and our warm, welcoming, cozy tents for a recuperative deep sleep filled with warmth and camaraderie.
Sorry, I meant HQ and our thin, barren, uninsulated tents for a second session of shivering till morning in near complete silence.
If being an Eagle Scout had taught me anything, it was that hot food can rally the troops. While I knew that no dinner could raise the sinking spirits of my desolate crew, I decided to take a shot at slowing the leak before we were fully scuttled. I had made Zatarain's Dirty Rice many times on any number of trails or campsites, but I had never had my pot freeze shut while doing so. Such was the damp, coldness of Indiana winter; this was indeed a first. One unsuccessful dinner later, I tucked in and went to bed for another night of fending off Heffalumps and Woozles.
Miles covered Saturday: 19
A Parthian Shot
Describe morning
The bagging of our last leg one point was thankfully uneventful. It was a short 3 mile trip out and back on a well marked trail right from HQ. Much to our fury, however, we discovered that the first point of leg 2 was a very short distance down the exact trail we had just triumphantly returned from. As we had already decided to drop out at sundown, we quickly marked it off the list out of pure scorn. Our mood darkened considerably further as we plotted the rest of leg 2: while leg 1 was concentrated a short distance north, the farthest points of leg 2 were 5 miles out as the crow flies. This would nearly double as we negotiated unmarked trails and private property.
While we had ruled out completing the race (sheer reality), we wanted to recover some of our remaining pride and tag a couple of the closer points. Our desire for glory was not outweighed by our practicality, and we ruled out crossing the Jundland Wastes to the west. Two flags were a short distance off of a main road, hopefully giving us a relatively pleasant trek out that would take until early afternoon.
A Reconciliation and Withdrawal
There is a particular phrase known to a small subset of mechanically apt individuals, the “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” used hopefully in jest to describe a particular failure mode in which all parts of an assembly spontaneously separate beyond hope of repair. Aside from the great robot bifurcation of 2019, I have not seen a more grisly demise of gear than when the soles of Lauren’s boots gave up the ghost and completely delaminated, leaving her stranded some 4 miles from HQ. However, her snacks must have been laced with WWII trench soldier amphetamines, as she insisted she would be fine and we could tag another flag on our way back to HQ.
This, by the way, was a mile away from the first point we were attempting. To continue would require Lauren to continue hiking over not soft dirt but a service road strewn with fist-sized rocks with no access for emergency vehicles, should they be needed. While we all feigned disappointment, some better than others, a consensus was made to abort the mission at this point and turn back.
While Lauren had non-functional footwear, the rest of us weren’t doing great either. Having hiked nearly 30 miles in the previous 18 hours, we each were quietly grimacing with every step as our woefully unadjusted feet were finally revolting at the horrid treatment we were subjecting them to. Despite the typical midwestern sprawl of our Alma Mater, the topography and distances were incomparable as to be alien.
Our slow, almost shuffling movement would not have been out of place in a Discovery show about penguin migration as we trudged down the road to our final flag attempt of the race. Reaching the side trail, we followed the ridge before making a horrifying discovery: the orange and white flag would be somewhere among a forest of molting birch trees, making our task not unlike having to find a tennis ball in a lemon grove. At this point, I already was ready for strong words with the flag designers, but this arrangement especially seemed like some diving jest. Despite her best efforts to keep going, I knew Lauren was rapidly fading, and she stayed put while the rest of us started scouring the area for one last chance to end on a high note.
Nearly 30 fruitless minutes later, we decided not to repeat the last night, and called it quits for the second time that day. The second march back to HQ was slower than the first, but the conversation brightened as we turned our attention toward our eventual stop at Waffle House. Drooling all the way back, we split up when we arrived for the final time at HQ. Having packed in the morning, I quickly got the car while the others informed HQ that we would not be continuing. In spite of our previous dreariness, the other 4 were all bouncing on their heels as I pulled in to pick them up. Bags were tossed in the back, completely blocking my rearview mirror, and we tried to contain our excitement from the race officials as we headed down the gravel road away from the event. It didn't take long for us to mock the remaining teams we passed on the way out.
Miles covered Sunday: 14
A Pondering and Premeditation
After a mercifully short drive to the nearest Waffle House, we gorged ourselves on the lavishes of civilization by devouring almost 2,000 calories each before the first coffee refill. The cornucopias overflowed with waffles, sausage patties, double servings of hash browns, and eggs prepared in myriad ways. During the feast, we swore vows to never set foot on those infernal grounds, and tried to identify what brain rot or other adverse effects had caused us to register in the first place.
Driving back to campus was a joyous occasion; many a Pitbull song was played after Fleetwood Mac induced groans from the male occupants of the car. Unloading was an expedited affair; gear was thrown in a manner reminiscent of airplane baggage handlers. Goodbyes were given, promises of getting in touch were made, and we eventually retreated to our warm and welcoming beds.
Several days later, after the tents were dried, the clothes washed, and the gear packed away, it was revealed to me that Lauren and Aditi were considering signing up for next year’s Race. I recommended a visit to the Purdue Student Health’s counseling department.
A Farewell
This concludes my retelling of that fateful weekend. Despite the bleak atmosphere of this tale, I am very glad to have done it, and I would like to thank my team for being amazing throughout the entire harrowing ordeal. You are all amazing, even if you’re crazy for wanting to do it again, and I wish you the best of luck. Thank you also to the POC for putting on such a great event. The amount of planning and work it required was not lost on me, even if I only experienced less than half of the intended course.
- Jordan D