Yukon orienteers are used to navigating through tricky terrain.

But the Yukon Orienteering Association (YOA) chose to switch it up Saturday night by turning off the lights.

Thirteen athletes met for the first annual night orienteering meet on Oct. 9 at Yukon Colleges.

The evening offered two courses, the 3.1-kilometre long course and the 1.1-km short course.

Orienteers donned headlamps and searched for markers wrapped in reflective tape while navigating pits, depressions and small knolls.

"There was some strategy involved,” organizer Bob Sagar said. "If someone had a light it's easy to follow them, and one of the more competitive guys turned their light off to make it so no one could follow them; and then they scared them by running by them with no light.”

So far as Sagar knew, this was the first night ‘O' meet in the Yukon.

It's a concept local orienteers had been thinking about for some time, he said.

"Night O meets do happen in other places, but the issue here in the Yukon is that in the spring, when we get rid of the snow, it's already too light to have one at a reasonable hour, and this time of year, we're starting to get ugly weather, but we decided we'd like to have one,” Sagar said.

The weather Saturday night was sloppy after the snow came earlier in the day but began to melt.

Clearly, though, slush wouldn't deter the diehards.

"We're hoping to make it an annual thing, a late-September thing,” Sagar said.

"We had a lot of the hardcore orienteers, the very good orienteers showed up, and they were enthusiastic, because it was first time that anybody's ever actually put on a night O in the Yukon, as far as we know.

"We had been talking about it during the summer. Other people do it in other places, but we always run into this problem of scheduling it in. And this time of year, we obviously didn't have ideal weather: it had been snowing and melted so it was kind of sloppy but that didn't seem to diminish the enthusiasm.”

Results are as follows:

Long course (3.1 km)

1. Brent Langbakk 24:28

2. Forest Pearson 27:45

3. Pam James 35:59

4. Daren Holcombe 40:00

5. Pipa McNeil 40:28

6. Kendra Murray 40:50

7. Dahria Beatty 40:50

8. Ryan Kelly 49:00

9. Karen McKenna 52:00

10. Wendy Nixon (did not finish)

Short course (1.1 km)

Jennifer MacKeigan 8:43

Lara Melnik 20:06

Elias Sagar 21:10