Our first night course: head torches, reflective tape and very short legs

Choosing the forest and the evening

Night orienteering changes what makes a good area. Complicated contours and faint paths that are pleasant in daylight become miserable in a head torch beam, so we picked the simplest forest we know: flat pine on sand south of the city, with a grid of straight forestry tracks, a couple of ditches and a clear boundary road on two sides. Every child had walked it in daylight at least twice. Familiar ground is the first safety rule of a night course.

We chose a Saturday with a dry forecast, a little frost and no wind, starting an hour after sunset, so the light had gone completely but nobody would be out past bedtime. Driven hunts take place on autumn and winter weekends here, so we asked the local forestry office which weekends would be quiet, and we told the two households living along the boundary road what the lights moving among the trees would be.

Shorter legs and bigger handrails

A night course is not a daytime course with the lights off. Our legs were about half the length we would set by day, the longest around three hundred metres, and every control sat on or right beside a handrail: a track, a ditch, the end of a fence. Attack points mattered more than ever. Each flag had something large and hard to miss a short, straight walk away, so the children could reach that point confidently and then slow right down for the last stretch.

The flags themselves gained two extra strips of reflective tape, top and bottom, and nothing else changed. A head torch picks up reflective tape from a surprising distance, which makes night flags easier to see than day ones once you are near the right spot, and much harder if you are not. That contrast is the whole lesson. The children soon found that the tape only flashes back when the torch is pointing where the map says it should.

Pairs, torches and the safety bearing

Every child went round in a pair with another child of similar age, with an adult following at a distance and their own torch switched off so as not to light the way. Each pair carried two head torches, a spare battery, a whistle, a phone and a map with the boundary road highlighted in thick yellow. The rule was simple: if you are lost for more than five minutes, walk the safety bearing, which in that forest meant heading east until you reach the road.

Head torches were the only kit anybody had to think about. A torch bright enough to read the map by is often too bright to look ahead with, because the glare off the paper spoils your night vision. The older children learned to tip the beam down onto the map for a moment, then up to the trees, and to turn the brightness down while reading. The ones who kept the beam on full all evening saw less, not more, and admitted it afterwards.

What we would change

Nobody got lost, which is the headline. Two pairs overshot the same control, a flag at the end of a short ditch, because in the dark the ditch was far shallower than they expected and they walked straight past its end. Next time that flag moves to a feature that is obvious at night, a junction or a small bridge, and the ditch becomes a handrail instead of a destination. Features that show themselves by shape in daylight often vanish in a beam.

The part we underestimated was the car park. Children finishing a night course are cold, excited and hungry, and the waiting adults were simply cold. The second time we brought flasks of tea, a camping lantern on a car roof as a finish beacon and a bag of spare hats and gloves. The children now want a night course every month from November to February. We have agreed to two a winter, which is what the adults can bear.

The youngest children did not do the course, and we are glad we held to that. Instead they had a string course near the car park: a line of reflective streamers tied from tree to tree along a loop of about four hundred metres, with three small flags hanging on it and a parent at each end. They walked it twice with torches and came back convinced they had orienteered in the dark, which, in the way that matters at six years old, they had.