Adventure Racing race 11:00:00 [4]
ARWC with Brent, Mark Lattanzi, and Andy Bacon. The race took us from Jackson Hole to Casper, a point-to-point journey of nearly 500 miles.
After several days of counting calories, sorting and weighing gear, and pre-race hoopla, we boarded buses on Thursday at 5:30am to make the six-hour trip to Jackson. Brent and I had a rough night's sleep the night before, as our pup - who spent race week with Denise Mast from NYARA - got sick all over our room (we think he found some gels at the afternoon briefing). We did our best to put it behind us and focus instead on the maps, which we received that morning, but not the ideal way to begin a six-day race.
The maps revealed a relatively predictable course, given the schematic Adventure Enablers had sent out a couple weeks earlier, but we've learned in past expeditions that predictable doesn't necessarily mean straightforward, and we hoped that there may be more nav and route choice than it seemed at first glance.
We pulled into the Jackson Hole Mtn Resort, which we'd visited the week before with my family, sorted our trackers and e-punches, met up with Ali Bronsdon, who would be doing Rootstock team media for the week, and listened as Untamed's Jesse Tubb trumpeted the National Anthem before the gun went off promptly at 1:00pm (or, rather 1:01pm, but given the delays over the course of the morning, it was impressively punctual!).
The prologue consisted of a short trail run around the ski resort, a few miles and 1000 feet of elevation. With no packs and everyone itching to move, it was fast and furious and particularly painful for those of us whose lungs tend to reside at sea level.
Since it was the world champs - and since we knew it would be a relative horse-race, compared to some other expedition races we've competed in - we set goals based on the course rather than the teams around us, and we made time projections on each leg accordingly. So we were happy to find ourselves back at the start to pick up our gear at 1:45pm, right at the fast estimate for the course.
We transitioned quickly to a seven-mile run along a flat rail trail to the packraft put-in. While I was hurting during the prologue, I was able to settle into a relatively comfortable pace for this second leg and enjoyed chatting with the other teams around us and talking about the course. We hung out with WEDALI for the first few miles, and then they started to pull away as Brent moderated the pace a bit to prevent heat issues from taking hold.
The run was an expected slog, but it was over soon enough, and we made quick work of inflating our packrafts and stowing our gear in the beam before setting off on a 19-mile paddle down the swift, braided Snake River. Brent and I stuck together in our boat, with Mark and Andy in the other. We were all in Alpacka Gnu's. This worked out well in terms of weight distribution, and we had a ton of fun navigating the various channels and confluences and rapids. Brent and I have packrafted together a lot and have found a pretty good rhythm, particularly in more challenging water. There are few people I trust more than him in terms of boat handling, which makes it really easy to have confidence that we'll get to where we need to be.
The paddle passed quickly as we chased the teams ahead of us and traded places with WEDALI, Silent Chasers, Storm, and Dart. We pulled out around 6pm, a couple hours earlier than we'd anticipated, and once again focused our energy on a quick and efficient TA to the first big section of the race -- a 38-mile trek and 10,000 feet of elevation, with zero checkpoints along it.
We headed out on foot with Main Nerve and trekked together for the first couple hours. The rules stated that you had to leave TA via the Palmer Creek Trail, but they were pretty ambiguous from there. We thought seriously about traveling a couple hundred meters up the trail before bushwhacking SW to a road and avoiding much of the ridgeline altogether. But enough people had the same idea and tried to ask questions about (or around) it at the pre-race briefing that RD Mark Harris mandated that everyone stay on the trail for at least a kilometer (and several hundred feet of elevation), at which point it wasn't worth doubling back.
Instead, we hiked up, up, up, pausing to fill our bladders since we knew water would be scarce along the ridgline. Main Nerve started to pull ahead after the water stop (they went on to have a spectacular race), and we spent the next several hours traveling and trading places with handful of teams: DART, Peak Life, Free Mind Italy, Storm, the Danes, maybe a couple others? We were treated to a glorious sunset along the ridgeline, and then we settled in at around 9,000-9,500 feet, where we'd spend much of the night. Surprisingly, for how tight the field was, we also found ourselves on our own a fair bit of the time, and we enjoyed the relative quiet of the first night of racing and the challenges of trying to follow the faint trail in the dark...