Red Feather Lakes, CO at the Ben Delatour Scout Ranch
Rocky Mountain Adventure Series
JZ and PWild, 2p Coed (Finished 2p Coed 2nd Place and 6th Overall)
Prerace meeting: 8:30pm
Weather: High in the 20’s overnight dropping to single
digits, 60% chance of snow and wind gust up to 40mph. Yikes!
Preplanned: Boiled
water put in thermoses at Start/Finish and one in the Bin for T/A. We had a jet boil but the wind was too crazy
to heat anything up to eat. Just keep
moving……
The race format: “any order” and “nothing is mandatory”. All points are optional and you have to get
those points within the leg and use that mode of travel. No going back to legs and getting points out
of leg order. And be back in 12 hours or
you start to lose points. “Create your
own adventure”. This is our favorite. Bring on the Night!
Our Plan:
Prologue, Opening Trek, Bike to CP6-CP9, check time and proceed to other bike CPS or Bike to final trek, then to finish.
What really happened....
The race started with a short Halloween themed prologue. They had two persons from each team come
forward to a large tangled web of string.
You had to find your team number on one end of the string, find the
other end for the other teammate and tie the string to yourself. Then when they said go you had to try and go
up, under, over and thru to get the string un tangled without untying it to
your teammate on the other end. Was
very challenging since you had other teams tangled in as well at the same time. This brought out comic relief as people were
crawling, going under picnic tables, over tree limbs, etc. Taking about 5 minutes total to longer it was
funny.
Leg 1: Trek
Leg 2: Bike (We should re title this one to HIKE A BIKE, due to our navigation choice) We took off out of the T/A 1 and took a short route choice, we thought thru the woods on the blue diamond trail as it
looked like it intersected the road just up a short hill…..all we had to do was follow it north and
it would hit the road. Hike a bike
straight up off the dirt road and across the small creek bridge covered in
moss. (not traveled a lot) It started
to snow like blizzard straight sideways making it hard to focus with your
headlamps. It was white out conditions
and it took all of us to keep our heads down and the snow out and keep the heat in. Climb, climb,
keep pushing….we would try to ride 20 feet and end up off our bikes again
looking for the trail markers….. Seemed
liked we just keep going and going. Then
there it was!, no not the road but a building……what? We shouldn’t have run into a building…… so we decided to regroup, go in the outhouse
bathroom, and look at the map out of the wind and snow. It didn;'t take long until "Remember when I said we should have just
stayed north"…..well somehow the trail turned and went due northeast and now we were
in the camp soaring eagle section of the course.
Lesson re-learned, Follow your bearing, pretty rookie mistake. Feet started to get cold from all the trekking in bike shoes, so we had to take a minute and change our socks, warm up a little and regroup. This really put a damper on our spirit but we prevailed!
Lesson re-learned, Follow your bearing, pretty rookie mistake. Feet started to get cold from all the trekking in bike shoes, so we had to take a minute and change our socks, warm up a little and regroup. This really put a damper on our spirit but we prevailed!
Leg 3: TA 2/3….was
just a gate road entrance. No shelter
from the snow and wind. So we grabbed
our Bin and got on the other side of the volunteer car to try and block some of
the cold wind as it was single digits at this point WITHOUT wind chill. Sat down on the plastic we had
to change to our trekking shoes. We didn’t
want anything else in our bin but the HOT WATER. We drank to warm our core again and hurried
to move on. Keep moving, it’s the only
way to stay warm. This trekking section
was a area that was not like the first trek.
This was very windy prairie, open, windy, rocky, and windy, with ups and downs in the wind and the snow
covered the trails so you really had to watch where to go. We got CP21 and CP18. Leaving CP 19 & 20) CP18 was a grave and
jay played a trick on my and said “it looks like its dug up” yelling down to
me, I said “what? In a freaked out
voice as its close to Halloween!” and he said “just kidding". My water had frozen and I had to rely on JZ’s
to drink. The trick of blowing the water
back down your hose was a new one to me. As we took the road back to the T/A 2/3 to our bikes the sun started to
come up, we thought this be a warming feeling but it just seemed to feel
colder. The bar mitts on our bikes saved
our fingers. It wasn’t till this point
in the race that we started to get REALLY cold. Temps just kept dropping the whole race.
Leg 4: Bike to CP22
and to finish. My bike chain decided to
freeze and would let me change gears. So
riding a single speed and that S*&cks, lol. Jay was afraid if I tried to change gears
while riding it would break the chain and we would be walking back. At one point we switched bikes, jay worked
on my chain got it free and then rode my bike….keep in mind hes 6’2 and im 5’6
and he looked like a clown on a small bike ……but we got it moving again. Back
to the finish, we were done, its hard to keep eating as well when all your food
if frozen. But we made it. What an amazing race night in the woods. Good times and thank you Katie and the Boy Scouts!
Post Race: We had a
small breakfast burrito when we finished, thank you Katie's Mom. We had about an hour to wrap up event so we went to change out of our
cold cloths. That was nice! We returned and did a lot of talking and
chatting with other racers. We enjoyed
the going around the room and hearing how others got into this awesome sport. We look forward to seeing them again and building the Colorado and beyond AR family. Congrats to all the first timers, stellar job.
Thank you Katie, Nic and matthew and all the
volunteers. And for the photos!!! It was really nice to see Katie at the finish
and the photographer to catch the emotion of our frozen faces.
