How the Arctic Orienteering Club Navigates Alaska’s Wilderness with Avenza Maps
Arctic Orienteering Club is a volunteer-driven organization dedicated to promoting orienteering through community engagement, events, and map-based outdoor activities across Alaska. With 120 regular members and a commitment to welcoming newcomers, the club's mission is to foster a love for orienteering by hosting meets, training new participants, and maintaining high-quality navigation experiences for enthusiasts of all skill levels.
But executing smooth events in remote locations across Alaska is no easy task. It requires precision mapping, reliable tools, and seamless data workflows, all under volunteer leadership. Managing an orienteering club in such an environment brings distinct navigation and mapping challenges that directly impact both event quality and participant experience.
The Challenge: Mapping in Alaska’s Remote Terrain
One of the biggest challenges is ensuring control flags (used as checkpoints in the sport) are placed with absolute precision. Even a few meters off can throw off participant times and undermine the fairness of a course. Volunteer meet directors often spent 40 to 60 hours setting up a course, which included multiple trips to the site and coordinating with another volunteer to test-run the course in advance to ensure its accuracy before the weekly meet.
Map maintenance was another ongoing challenge. Trails evolve, new data pours in from members, and integrating those updates into the main maps was a tedious process prone to errors. Outdated maps increased the risk of participants getting lost, which was a recurring issue in past events.
On top of that, maps needed to meet Orienteering Federation standards for a variety of formats, including ski, mountain, and bike orienteering. That meant the club had to balance accuracy, visual clarity, and discipline-specific symbology, all without dedicated technical staff.
The Avenza Maps Solution
With events regularly attracting newcomers, especially families with young children, the club needed reliable systems to ensure their first experiences were enjoyable, not frustrating due to map errors. To address these issues, Arctic Orienteering Club adopted Avenza Maps to modernize their mapping workflows and field operations. The platform quickly gained support thanks to its reliability, simplicity, and offline capabilities, and its tools proved essential in Alaska's remote terrain.
Avenza’s offline maps ensured fieldwork could continue without connectivity; GPS tracking enabled precise placement of control flags; and point collection features allowed volunteers to capture and validate over 25 control points per course.
Field data could be seamlessly synced with master maps, improving accuracy through integrated trail data and map editing. Custom symbology ensured compliance with Orienteering Federation standards across various disciplines, including ski, bike, and mountain orienteering.
Finally, map accuracy validation tools, supported by lidar data, helped the club enhance overall map quality. While the maps are created by professional cartographers who are volunteers, these tools, along with extensive field checking, play a key role in ensuring reliable and accurate courses.
Streamlined Mapping Workflow
Building on these capabilities, the club follows a streamlined mapping workflow tailored to Alaska’s challenging environment. Mappers begin by collecting GPS data in the field using Avenza Maps, capturing precise control locations and trail details. This data is then reviewed and synced with lidar-based master maps to ensure alignment and accuracy. Final maps are carefully validated, edited, and distributed for use in meets. As a result, participants navigate with confidence, relying on up-to-date, high-precision maps designed specifically for each course.
"Avenza has changed the way we make our maps and put on our meets. Club members and meet directors can easily pinpoint needed map edits and we can all have higher confidence in the quality of our courses.”
Results & Impact
The adoption of Avenza Maps led to measurable improvements across the club’s operations:
- Improved Accuracy: Control placement errors used to be a recurring issue, but have now been virtually eliminated. Since adopting the new system, participant complaints have been greatly reduced and the club is getting positive feedback on map accuracy and control placement.
- Reduced Event Risk: Organizers no longer rely on intuition or visual cues alone; GPS-backed workflows ensure control points are placed with precision every time.
- Increased Confidence: Volunteers and participants now trust in the accuracy and professionalism of every course, leading to smoother events.
- Stronger Retention: By providing a better experience, first time participants are coming back for more, learning about the sport, and completing more difficult courses.
The Arctic Orienteering Club’s experience shows how combining volunteer passion with the right technology can overcome even the toughest challenges of remote event planning. By modernizing their mapping processes and leveraging Avenza’s GPS precision and offline capabilities, they’ve created safer, more accurate, and more enjoyable experiences for all participants. This progress not only raises the quality of every event but also helps build a stronger, more engaged orienteering community across Alaska.