This is big nine-day stretch for orienteering in the Yukon.

And it's not only because of the Western Canadian Orienteering Championships (WCOC) held last weekend or the upcoming Canadian Orienteering Championships (COC) set for this weekend in Whitehorse.

The Sass Peepre National Junior Training Camp is winding down today after starting Tuesday.

The training camp is for junior orienteers ranging in age from 10 to 20 and ranging from beginners to elites.

Yukoner Pia Blake is attending the camp for the fourth time, having attended camps during the COC in New Brunswick in 2008, in Kimberley and Cranbrook, B.C. during the North American Orienteering Championships and another in Ottawa during COC in 2010.

"The camp is a fun way to get to know other people that do the sport around the country, and to just really improve your basic skills – that's really what it's about,” the 15-year-old said.

Blake competed in the Westerns from July 16-18, when she went three-for-three.

She earned gold in the long-course (4.2 kilometres) with a time of 50 minutes, three seconds; gold in the middle distance (2.3 km) in 24:19; and gold in the sprint in 17:44.

The Whitehorse edition of the Sass Peepre, which used Mount McIntyre as home base, is different from the other camps Blake has attended.

"This camp is really focusing on precise things everyday, it's just about a different

subject,” she said.

"Mostly it's about technical things. Today we're doing compass work, yesterday we worked with contours. It's not so much the physical part that we work with at these camps, it's more the technical, improving the way you read the maps, the way that you are able to complete your course faster.”

Attending the camp sandwiched in between Westerns and Canadians has helped her retain focus for the upcoming competition, she said.

"It's good continuously seeing maps, thinking about it, processing all of the different things that we're doing and then being able to apply them to races that I did last weekend and say, ‘I could have done that better.' I think it's a really good idea to have the two competitions and then the camp in between.”

The camp was attended by national team members Louise Oram and Will Critchley, as well as junior national team members who recently returned from the Junior World Orienteering Championships held in Poland.

Camp coach Steve Heron said orienteering is one of the only sports he knows where the country's top athletes attend a camp with beginners.

"They're here to learn, they're here to teach, and they're helping out with some of the younger kids and they're learning from some of the older kids,” said Heron, who hails from Saint John, N.B.

"It's just a good excuse to get all the young orienteers together to build the energy.”

"This is an interesting development model, because we get some kids at these camps who have never been orienteering before, and we've got some of our top junior team members are here as well, and they're all here to learn together.”