Salomon Winter Adventure Race
Steamboat, Colorado
Feb 24-25, 2001
Cindy Gagnon

The Salomon Winter Adventure Race, aka WAR, was a 2-day staged adventure race for the winter enthusiasts. The first day was designed by the race directors to be a backcountry experience, and the race lived up to a mountaineerÕs expectation. Cindy Gagnon and Carl Gable, Team Santa Fe members, and Scott Begun of Boulder raced as Team Santa Fe. Twenty four teams of 3 began the long day with skis, skins, snowshoes and enough food and water for a long day (8-10 hours) Teams were given the route with 6 checkpoints and allowed to use any mode of snow travel they chose throughout the day, except for one leg of designated snow shoe travel. TSF chose to start with the skis and carry the snowshoes and began the race with a climb of 1500 ft to the Top of Emerald Mountain. From there, the course traveled west along a ridge onto a private ranch. However, this is where TSF, along with 22 of the 24 teams made a grave navigation error. Carl sensed early on that we were heading in the wrong direction, "I think I hear the trees calling me to go left", but the thought of breaking trail through 3-4 feet of bottomless snow was stronger than his intuition. Like a flock of lemmings, we followed the teams in front of us. But that was okayÉ we were about to be rewarded with the wonderful downhill, or so we thought. TSF members were all strong backcountry tele-skiers, but two of us (Cindy and Scott) soon found out without our plastic boots and nice tele-skies, we were like beginner skiers in the deep snow. It was time to turn to survival techniques, which consisted of skiing about 20-30 feet, falling face first into the deep powder, walling around trying to get back on your skies to just get up an do it again. Carl on the other hand had excellent survival techniques and had a lot of rest (and laughs from what I can remember) waiting for the two of us as we did our ski/fall/swim routine. CP2, with a cut-off time of 12 noon, was still 2.5 miles away when we found ourselves walking along a road carrying both skis and snowshoes. We finally found the trailhead, quickly got back on our skies and arrived at CP2 with 15 minutes to spare (10 teams never made it to the CP before the cutoff). CP2-CP3 was the designated snowshoe section, so we put on our shoes and headed up the long climb to CP 3. The surrounding beauty really took away the pain of the long uphill climbs. At CP3, we got back on our skis and navigated up and down a set of powerlines for the next 3.5 hours. We arrived at the rappel site about 10 minutes before 4. To our luck, the cutoff time of 3pm had been moved to 4pm as only two teams made it by the 3pm cut off. So we did the 35 ft rappel, and traverse along the base of the rappel for 300 ft, which turned out to be the hardest travel of the day (You try to make 4th class moves with a pack with skis and snowshoes in your ski boots on rocks covered with thick bushes, ice and snowÉ "I want a belay". We finished day 1 with a fast downhill run on the ski slope. Boy, that was an awesome 10 hours. Saturday eve was a well-deserved Pasta Dinner where TSF was one of the lucky winners in the WAR raffle, just missing out on the big prize of the new Solomon X-Adventure winter adventure racing boots and snowshoes.