Sport: Over the River, Into the Trees

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The cold and silence of a New England winter forest is broken by the voices of a man and his two excited children. They pick their way along a meandering brook, pausing regularly to sweep aside branches or peer at compass and map. Near by, an elderly couple stride purposefully down a Jeep trail, jauntily swinging their arms and breathing deeply the crisp, fine air. Suddenly, a sweatsuit-clad figure crashes through the underbrush into a clearing. Panting from a hard run, mud dripping from his shoes, face scratched by brambles, he stares wildly about, then plunges into the thick brush once more. Despite their different styles, all of the people making their way through the forest area near Boston are participating in the sport of orienteering−speed hiking over a prescribed course in unfamiliar terrain, using only a compass and a map to navigate.

Orienteering is a survival skill with military origins. It made the transfer to civilian sport shortly after World War I when a former Swedish army officer set up orienteering programs for schoolchildren. Students who had balked at conventional fitness programs poured into the forests to race from checkpoint to checkpoint, studying maps, steadying compasses and racing against the orienteer's chief adversary, the clock.

Easy Trails. The program is now mandatory in Scandinavian public schools. As part of the increasing interest in outdoor recreation, orienteering has spread to other European countries and the U.S. This past July, a five-day competition in Sweden drew 16,000 contestants from some 25 countries.

An orienteering meet most closely resembles an automobile rally−without the cars. In a typical contest, organizers lay out several courses, ranging from a mile-long hike over easy trails to six-mile scrambles across streams, swamps and hills. Contestants, either alone or in teams, leave the starting point at fixed intervals, moving through the quiet beauty of the forest toward unseen checkpoints marked by map coordinates. For many, it is just a "hike with a purpose," an opportunity to stroll or picnic. For others, it is a madcap race in which speed afoot is as important as accuracy of map reading. A fast runner might plot a lengthier indirect course over clear ground, whereas a canny, perhaps flabbier orienteer might take the shorter, riskier route of a direct bearing.

"The trick," says a top American orienteer, Peter Gagarin, "is to balance between speed and accuracy. You can be a terrifically fast runner, but that's no good at all if you can't find the checkpoints." Indeed, a small error in compass reading can land an orienteer dozens of yards away from−and make him unable to spot−a plastic punch dangling from a tree. Each punch makes a distinctive perforation in the hiker's punch card, indicating that he reached a particular checkpoint.

TIME Correspondent David Wood teamed with Expert Orienteer Hans Jurgen Luwald to measure his own speed and map-reading skills during the meet near Boston. His account: