Kimberley and Cranbrook are welcoming hundreds of international athletes, their families and 100 volunteers this week, as the Kootenay Orienteering Club hosts the North American Orienteering Championships.

Orienteering is a sport in which competitors navigate through unfamiliar and diverse terrain, using a map and compass to find a series of checkpoints along route. “It’s kind of like a road race, only you’re on trails in the forest and you’re following a map,” says Jim Webster, with the Kootenay Orienteering Club. “It’s a bit like geocaching without the GPS, in a more formal environment.”

The North American Championships for Orienteering, an event held every two years, alternates between a location in Canada and the U.S. This year it’s Canada’s turn, and Kimberley and Cranbrook are the hosts.

About 475 competitors have arrived in Kimberley and Cranbrook for the five-day event. While Canada and the U.S. are the main countries involved, the event is open to elite orienteers from all over the world, based on a ranking system not unlike international soccer rankings, say.

The competition features age classes from 10 and under to 80 and over. Organizer Jim Webster, with the Kootenay Orienteering Club, says three people are entered in the over-80 category. “Two of them are a couple from Montreal, who are driving out to this.”

Family members of the competitors have also come to town, and a corps of 100 volunteers supports the whole event.

“A lot of people do this as families,” Webster said. “We have a family from Finland - the kids are running in their categories, the parents in theirs.”

On Wednesday, Kimberley is host to the O-mazing Race starting a 5 p.m. in the Platzl. “This is a real fun, welcoming kind of event,” Webster said. “It’s open to the locals as well as the orienteering competitors — they can go into that event as an event or as a team or family.”

Entrants get a modified street map of Kimberley with some trivia questions. They’ll go to the different locations, and learn a little bit about Kimberley - there’ll be a trivia question related to each question. “It’s an icebreaker,” Webster said. “The competitors will learn a little bit about the town, and locals can come out and see who these people are.”

Registration for the event is at 5 p.m. The walking category starts at 6 p.m.; if you want to run or bike, that category starts at 6:30 p.m.

On July 1, a so-called Thomass event- a type of orienteering race - takes place in Kimberley starting at 2:30 at the Kimberley Nordic Trails. “It’s different from all the other races in that it’s a mass start,” Webster said. This event is handicapped, like golf, according to age.

“If you’re a top orienteer, you have to get all 25. If you are 10-year-old, or a 75-year-old, you may only have to get 12 or 13 of them. Everyone starts together, but based on the handicapping, theoretically everyone should finish together.”

The next three events, set for July 2, 3 and 4, are the North American Championship events - “these are the ones where they’ll actually win the North American Championship medals.”

The events are structured according to sprints, middle distance and long distance. The middle distance course, which runs July 2, is about four and a half kilometres, with 10-15 checkpoints to find. It starts up behind Eager Hill in the Cranbrook Community Forest. The long distance event on July 3, again up behind Eager Hill, is designed for the top elite orienteers, Webster said. The course is about 14 kilometres, as the crow flies. “But because they’re navigating these checkpoints, they might be running 16 or 17 kilometres,” Webster said.

For the younger people, the course is about two and a half kilometres, along the trails, Webster said. But all the challenges of orienteering come out with this course.

“You’d be looking for a rock in the middle of the forest, or a small hill, and you’ve got to really use your navigation skills to be able to find that point.”

July 4 features the Sprint, with courses of one and a half to two kilometres.

In many ways the Sprint is the showcase event of the championships. “It’s the best event for people to come and watch,” Webster said. “It starts and finishes at the stadium at the College of the Rockies. The winning times are going to be something like 10 to 15 minutes for all the different categories.

“They’ll start at one end of the stadium, run into the Community Forest, and then back into the stadium. They’ll finish up right in front of the (grandstands). So you can come out and cheer on your favorite country, and we’ll have a race announcer giving play-by-play for the elite orienteers.”

The orienteers are certainly athletes in their own right, and an international sampling of the sports elite will among the competitors. These athletes will be the focus

“The national orienteering teams for Canada and the United States are coming,” Webster said. “And we’ve got the second-highest ranked orienteer from the Asia-Pacific region - he’s from Japan - and top guys from Sweden ... so we’ll really be featuring that top elite world ranking category at that event.

“At the same time, all the other age categories will be participating.”

The logistics of mounting such a big event were considerable, Webster said.

“When we were awarded this in 2007, there were three or four members of our club in Kimberley and Cranbrook that took this on. Since then, we’ve built a core of real technical volunteers, coming out of clubs in Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton that are doing the course design and the technical aspects of it.

“We brought in a Swedish mapper, now living in Vancouver, who did all the field checking for the maps. We brought in another mapper from Williams Lake.

“We had the whole Community Forest flown over, to take aerial photographs. Then we sent the photographs to a company in England who made a base map.

“Then the base map was what the mappers used for two months to do the field checking.”

Webster said the event also serves as a much broader showcase for the entire region.

“I’m really pleased that we could bring this to the area, and introduce the East Kootenay to the world. The fact that we can bring these people - hopefully they’ll go away and tell everybody how nice it was.”

Webster also mentioned the great support the club has had from the Cities of Kimberley and Cranbrook, and the tourism department and local businesses. “People have really gone the extra mile. It’s been great.”