Team Santa Fe at the Races

CONTINUED
Four Winds USA Supreme Adventure Race
400+ Mile Expedition Race
Driggs, Idaho
August 4-12, 2001
By Lisa Barnes and Don Moden 

The descent down Hell Hole Canyon was even more exciting with lots of scree fields, lots of slipping and sliding, and lots of yelling "rock". We finally reached a point where we needed to do 75 foot rappel, and it just happened that each team was required to carry a 75 foot piece of rope. We set up an anchor with part of one of the ropes and used the other two ropes do a double rope rappel. With a double rope rappel, we were able to pull the ropes and keep them in case we needed to do it again. We continued trekking all day to Checkpoint 16 and finally reached Checkpoint 17 / TA 4 on Tuesday night.

All three teams had fun traveling together and decided to continue on together after a couple hours of sleep. We were transitioning to kayak paddling on the Palisades Reservoir, so we decided to start the kayak at 2 a.m. after the full moon had risen. We met Team Adidas at the kayaks, and realized that Team Blade Runner was still sleeping. Not sure of their plans, we went ahead and started the paddle. The paddle was short and easy to navigate at night. The chem lights at the checkpoints make them much easier to find at night, especially since Checkpoint 19 was in the wrong spot. We found out later that a couple of the teams spent a lot more time looking for this che! ckpoint in the daylight due to the wrong location. We paddled for a total of 3 hours and reached Checkpoint 20 / TA 5.

From here we transitioned to another long trekking section again. We did see Blade Runner reaching the TA as we were hiking away. We were in the sun all morning, and by the time we reached Checkpoint 21, early afternoon, we were out of water. The topo showed a spring by the checkpoint, but we spent 2 hours trying to find the spring. We finally found some stagnate, small puddles of water amongst the tall grass. At this point, Blade Runner showed up and they were carrying a water filter. We all worked together and filtered out as much water as we could get, but it was still not enough to fill up everyone's water bladders and bottles.&nb! sp; We decided that race management had made a mistake about which section of the course to tell us to carry extra water bladders. We had found an abundance of water on the previous trekking section. We proceeded on to Checkpoint 22, all three teams traveling together. We reached Checkpoint 22 after dark and then struggled to reach Checkpoint 23. Everyone was out of water and dehydrated. The navigating had also become much more difficult due to darkness and the fact that we were coming across a good number of roads and trails that were not on any map. We finally reached Checkpoint 23 / TA 6 during the night on Wednesday.

We quickly ate, drank and went to sleep. We slept 2 hours and then transitioned to mountain biking. We were quite excited that we did not have to trek anymore. Our feet were sore, and we had some good blisters. We used moleskin, duct tape, and Hydropel to patch them up as best as we could. Team Adidas left the TA about 45 minutes ahead of us, and Team Blade Runner was just getting up as we left the TA. We ended catching up with Adidas after about 15 miles and then teamed up with them for the rest of the race. This was a beautiful mountain bike ride through the Caribou National Forest and up and over Jensen Pass. The descent down Jensen Pass was steep, fast and fun. Don did a great job of navigating and we reached our support crew just after dark on Thursday night. It was great ride that we all really enjoyed.

They allowed us to meet up with our support crew prior to going to Checkpoint 26 / Unassisted TA 7 where we transitioned to the kayaks for a trip down the Snake River. This allowed us a chance to get some hot food from Terry our support person. There was uch discussion between the two teams about the idea of paddling the river at night. The race officials had not made the situation easy for neither the race participates or our support crews. We could not camp where the support crews were located, so if we decided to stay with them, we all had to pack up and move to another area to sleep. The racers could continue on their mountain bikes to the unassisted TA and sleep there, but this was also in a small parking! area next to the kayaks by the river. A decision was made to continue on and start the kayak at night. Not everyone was comfortable with this decision, and as it turned out in hindsight, we should have just stayed with the support crews and moved to a different area to get some sleep with the plan of starting the kayaking at first light.

We biked on to the TA and started the kayak during the night. The river was very hard to read after dark, and we were looking for a difficult checkpoint at a waterfall that required us to be in the farthest left channel as possible so that we would not overshoot the falls. We were traveling too slow and became uncomfortable after we found ourselves in a small channel on the left that was very shallow and not the correct channel. We decided to bail to shore and sleep a couple of hours until first light. After the sun came up and we warmed up a bit, we headed back down the river and found the falls checkpoint without any problem. We then continued on to Checkpoint 28 where we had to exit the boats and hike up to! the top of Tablerock for a 400-foot rappel. From here we continued on down the river and reached Checkpoint 29/ TA 8 by Friday afternoon.

We had a good transition and after about an hour we were off on our mountain bikes for the last leg of the race. There were three teams in front of us that we knew we most likely had no chance of catching, so at this point we just wanted to finish and maintain the position we currently held. The navigation was very difficult on this section. We encountered a lot of unmarked roads that were not on any of the maps. Don did an excellent job of navigating and we were actually never lost, but we sure did a lot of second guessing ourselves. During the night, we became very concerned about our actual location and also it became very cold. Team Adidas did not have any long ! pants and we were getting colder each time we stopped to figure out where we were. We decided to build a fire to warm everyone back up and get a few hours of sleep. We slept for 3 hours until the sun came up. Once the sun was up, Don scouted a fork in the road, decided which way was correct and we proceeded to find Checkpoints 30 and 31.

Checkpoint 32 was on a ridge, which required us to hike our bike for a 1,000 feet up a steep trail. The single track ride down, (it was really a hiking path) was also quite exciting and steep. We were happy to reach flat ground and finish the race up with a ride back to Driggs. We reached the finish line just after 6 P.M. on Saturday.

It was reported that we attained more than 65,000 feet in elevation gain and covered more than 400 miles during the race with most of the race occurring at an altitude of between 7,000 and 10,000 feet. We felt pretty good at the end and really enjoyed the whole experience. Team Santa Fe finished the race fourth overall and first in the 2-person mixed category.

 

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