The first official TTC Orienteering Trail Challenge was held at Midsummer Madness at the 7iL Ranch in Cat Springs, Texas in June 2010. It was a huge hit and the ride managers of the Texas Trail Challenges have agreed to have an OTC at three more of the TTC's this year. There will be an OTC on the following Sunday of these rides: West Side Story (Parrie Haynes Ranch), Six-0 Tango (Six-0 Ranch) and Gallopin' Goblins (Wood Rock Ranch).

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Competitive Mounted Orienteering is the newest trail sport to come to Texas! It can be described as a treasure hunt with maps where "O" marks the spot to begin searching for the objective instead of the pirate's "X". Clues are provided with compass bearings to guide you to the objective. Once you have found the "treasure" there will be either a secret code to write down on your map as proof of your success, or there might be a special hole punch to mark your map as well.

This is a team sport which is great for those of you who like to travel down the trail with your buddies. The fastest team to find all the objectives will win, so when you are between objectives you can move out a bit more than you usually do on a TTC ride. (The horses do like this.) Just make sure you don't go so fast that you accidentally miss an objective! Also, just to slow you down a bit more, trivia questions are scattered among the objectives that must be answered and phoning a friend who is not on the team is not allowed!

The best way to organize teams is to include folks who intend to ride the trail at about the same pace. At least one person should be good at map reading and being able to tell where you are "on the map". Everyone is on the lookout for trail markers as well as the locations where reference markers are to take your bearings (identified by the clues provided at the start). Someone needs to be responsible for "collecting" the special punches or scribing the letters from the objective. Someone needs to be able to scribe the answers from the trivia questions. Several folks need to be able to take bearings with their compasses and locate the objective. Everyone helps search for the objective once the intersection of the bearings has been identified. Sometimes the actual location of the objective can be tricky.

--- Betsy Zimmerman