A full contingent of urban explorers competed Wednesday night at the first event of the 2016 Yukon Orienteering Championships, a sprint race.

Around 80 people raced on the Takhini map, including members of the junior national team.

On the 4.1-kilometre expert course, Colin Abbott (17:21) raced to a win, followed by junior national team member Leif Blake (18:31) and last year’s winner, Trevor Bray, was third (20:12).

The top three ladies on the course were Kerstin Burnett (22:53), Kendra Murray and Pia Blake tied for second (23:48) and Jennifer MacKeigan was third in 24:13.

Abbott said that he had some advantage on the map since he lives in the neighbourhood.

“That gives you some advantage, being used to the areas that are mapped,” he said. “At the same time orienteering takes you to places that you haven’t been in your own neighbourhood, or you wouldn’t have an excuse to go. It’s always a different experience, even if you live on a map.”

Sprint courses are traditionally faster than others, with less space in between each controls.

The race organizers admit that this course might have been a bit long for a sprint, but people were happy to run the map with four different course difficulties that had controls criss-crossing the neighbourhood, running near Yukon College, the softball diamonds and for some, along the escarpment. The start and finish for all the courses was at Takhini Arena.

“It was a longer sprint. The last leg was about three minutes for me, which is super long,” said Murray. “It was definitely different. It’s nice to see something different.”

While many of the runners had clean courses, there were a few controls that stopped them up.

“I had a couple tricky controls,” said expert-course competitor Darren Holcombe. “There was one that was in a fenced-in area and there were only two ways in,” he said. “One of the ways in was actually through a hole in the fence, so I thought that was kind of neat and then when I got to the control, the tree had been cut down. The symbol was distinct tree, but maybe this afternoon someone cut the tree down.”

Holcombe enjoys the challenge of orienteering.

“As soon as you start you just forget about everything else,” he said.

“You’re not even looking around too much, you’re just looking at how do I get from one to another to another and only when you’re finished do you pull out your map and go, ‘oh yeah, where was I.’”

There are two more events in the Yukon Orienteering Championships, the middle course, which will take place June 8 on the new Copper Ridge map and the long course, which will start at the hospital on June 15.

For the first time in more than 60 years, the Yukon will field a team at the Jukola Relay in Finland June 18 to 19.

Brent Langbakk, Ross Burnett, Jennifer MacKeigan, Leif Blake, Pia Blake, Forest Pearson and Caelen McLean will take part in the night orienteering relay. The race has been around since 1949 and this year more than 3,000 teams will participate. The shortest legs are eight-kilometres long, while the longest is likely to be 15.

“ The race is not entirely conventional, as it starts after sunset and goes through the night and into the morning with particularly long legs,” said Leif Blake. “That’s going to be pretty exciting having a team from the Yukon there and competing in that.”

In early July, the Blake siblings, Pia and Leif, will be joined by McLean as they compete at junior world championships in Switzerland with the rest of team Canada.

“I’m hoping to learn a lot and gain a lot of competitive experience from these races in  Europe this summer,” said Leif.

“I’m really excited.”