[It looks like I won't have a chance to get up my Kazakhstan stuff for a while. In the mean time, J-J left me a comment about mapping the green at Sebago while I was gone, and I aware that some readers of this page are interested in that sort of thing].

One thing that was odd about the map was that they mapped the blueberry bushes as light green, where on the old map I have they were mapped as green slash. As viz was fine thru them, I'm not sure why they changed symbols.

It was a bit confusing at first but I got used to it. Ironically, I got in a couple ofpatches where there was no viz, and they stuck with the slash in those cases.

Perhaps someone made a mistake.

Not a mistake, but an intentional compromise.

The original 1984 map had some vertical green, and some regular green. Then, when the map was updated for the 2000 NA Champs, the two Bulgarian fieldcheckers put in tons of vertical green. Basically, they mapped all vegetation with lines. Some of this was appropriate, but a lot of it was stuff that was just thick stuff in the woods, and thafact that it isn't over your head really isn't all that important, not enough to warrant mapping it differently. In drafting this, I was immediately wary, so I created duplicate vertical green line symbols, and called them "Bulgarian vertical green". When the map was used in 2000, there were (as I expected) quite a few complaints that the map was very hard to read. So when HVO went to do this new printing, I made the suggestion that the "Bulgarian vertical green" be changed to regular green. I knew that this wouldn't be perfect, because, for example, some of the vertical green overlapped on rough open, and in using regular green, the vegetation took precedence over the open area, and the yellow was lost. And when you run into areas that were not updated, and still have the original fieldwork (or the WOC 1993 fieldwork in the NE section), there's a disconnect. But overall, I think the improvement in legibility was worth it. It remains to be seen what the general impression from the masses will be. (Easy enough to change it back if people like the vertical lines better.)