Gorge Winds II
I went to Hood River last weekend to race in an adventure! My team is Team Verve.
Peteris
(26 yo male); Murray
(53 yo male) and me 
(48 yo female).
The race was hard for me for many reasons, but two that are easy to share. 1. I have not been doing enough hard training and 2. the weather was cold and wet. The great news was that we were the only team to finish the race. So, I guess we won by default. I learned a lot for our next race in May. Here is Murray’s report on his experience in the race:
David Russell enjoys designing and organizing practice adventure races. The extent of the race and the level of detail were incredible. It is very nice that he invited our team to his event.
Team Verve consists of Peteris, Christi and me. Our competitors were Team DART (professionals), Miles and Andrew and two teams from the Portland area. Our directions were to act inconspicuous because the race was not approved by the state parks we travelled through, but you don’t often see such gritty, hardcore athletes located in one place. I thought it would be hard for these people to look like typical tourists.
Pre-race on Friday night was very ambivalent for me. It seemed like a long drive to the “Fish Hatchery” on the Columbia River, 35 miles east of Portland. The rain came steadily down, as the trains kept me awake, but I was happy to be going on an “outing” with friends. “Outing” is my euphemism for an “epic” effort which in turn means “surpassing the ordinary”. My thoughts on Friday evening were that David had organized a course that would surpass the ordinary, and I was not disappointed.
There was too much personal organization in the pre-race phase. I had three bags of gear, organized for each stage of the race. My two bikes were stored with the others’. The bike trailer had thirty very nice bikes worth more than $45K in total. I was borrowing Peteris’ 13ft plastic kayak. It was free and I have a boat for the race. Definitely, paddling this boat will be good training. Lisa calls me a boat snob. Adding each discipline increases the organizational load exponentially.
There were lots of last-minute organizational things, so we didn’t start the race until 10am on Saturday. The rain had stopped, and there were momentary blue spaces between grey clouds. Within minutes, the race settled down to a three-way competition between DART, Mergeo and us. Describing it as a competition really doesn’t do justice to the superb fitness and skill of the DART group. Unfortunately for them, there is a reason that these events are called “adventures”.
DART hiked the 1600 ft elevation gain and was first to reach the heather-covered hilltop checkpoint that was the 2nd checkpoint. We arrived just as they were disappearing off the south ridge about 250 meters away. Mergeo was just ahead of us and followed DART. We looked at the map, discussed the options and retreated back the way we had come. Did we make a mistake? Was the race organizer trying to direct us to a trail that went through to the next checkpoint, as they often do by the placement of the checkpoints?
Nearing the 3rd checkpoint an hour later, a robust looking tourist said “Are you in an adventure race?” Not wanting to disclose the clandestine mandate of the race, I asked “What makes you think we might be?” He answered that he had been in races with our race director. From him we learned that we were the first to get to the checkpoint. Our decision had proven to be a good one. Later we learned that DART was one hour behind at that point. They had found some old ropes and rappelled off mossy, loose cliffs to get to the waterfall checkpoint rather than retrace their steps. Mergeo was 30 minutes behind us in 2nd place, deciding early that DART had chosen the wrong route.
We were first into the kayaks and after various running loops and kayak orienteering. I was especially pleased with our decisions at the 4th kayak checkpoint. The location was marked with a circle on the map, and the race director gave us compass bearings to triangulate the exact position. The checkpoint was in a wooded area, so visibility was a problem. The compass bearings were wrong, and the race director’s numbers would put us somewhere in the Columbia River. This is very typical of an adventure race so we knew we need to second-guess. Peteris speculated about how the race director had made the error, and we found the checkpoint.
We were still first when we arrived at the “creeking” 5 hours later. The race director wanted us to walk through creek water up a spectacular canyon to a waterfall. The goal was to take a photograph at the base of the falls. The race director warned us that the cold water might be thigh deep in places, but he had walked it a lower water, and now the frigid water was waist deep at times, and there wasn’t anyplace in the canyon where we could get warmed up after the wading. Let’s just say that we didn’t get to the checkpoint even though we struggled mentally and physically with our failure. In fact, Miles was the only one to get to the checkpoint because he had anticipated the problems and brought hip waders. Smart! DART arrived just as we returned to the boats. We watched as they started through the first 100 meters. Then they just gave up! We cursed them as we left on the last section of kayaking, thinking that they made a very smart decision. They knew that we had missed the checkpoint. They knew that they were a stronger team. So they just needed to get ahead of us to win! DART beached their boats at the transition to cycling just before us.
The discussions between Peteris, Christi and me were totally wrong about DART. They were only going to do the daytime events, and were going back to Seattle that evening. So as the sun set, we jumped on our road bikes for next stage. It was a 40 mile road bike with four sections that were running. Here is a “teaser” for my next installment. We arrived at this waterfall at about midnight, but it was too dark to photograph at the time.
http://www.oregon.com/hiking/oneonta_gorge.cfm
Gorge Winds II: Enter the night
Our plan was to get as many checkpoints as we could out of the impossible number set before us. The basic plan was to park our bikes at four locations to do loops on the trails on foot. In addition we were supposed to ascend on our road bikes to 2600ft over about 15 miles. Mostly, things went according to plan.
Rather than write a long account of the mud, snow and pavement trails, I’ll just describe a few of my favorite moments.
At night, in the light of our headlamps and flashlights, the waterfalls are incredibly white. Their glow is almost fluorescent. We lost count of the number of spectacular falls we saw. The mist danced in front of our lights well before we arrived at the falls and well afterwards.
There was an occasional star, but more often we caught sight of street and house lights from cliff-top vantage points. The race director tried to get us to the great views, and since it was night, anywhere but near a city, the views would have been anticlimactic. Here the lights gave a huge depth to the landscape.
During the snow orienteering section we made some lucky decisions – finding a checkpoint in the bush and following an obscure trail. Some navigation challenges were welcome after trundling along well-marked trails in the dark for a few hours.
Now a few of my not so favorite moments.
The rain increased in intensity about the time we arrived from the 2nd foot section. What began as a symphony of raindrops in pianissimo was now moving to mezzo-piano. After a few flat miles of cycling we started climbing, followed by some more climbing. There were many views of far-off lights, but it was hard to enjoy. The symphony of raindrops was forte.
Climbing on a bike makes it is very tough to watch the speedometer with any sense of motivation. We had fifteen miles of climbing and our speed dropped to 6 miles per hour. “Over two hours of hard climbing in the hard rain” I thought. Although we had thought there was a potential to overheat with the effort of a 15 mile uphill ride, in reality it was cold. Old snow, beside the road, incrementally grew in height after about 12 miles. There was a crescendo of raindrops which brought on a sense of foreboding about the ride down.
Wet snow started to fall, and Christi stopped the craziness. Nobody even whispered dissension though we hadn’t reached the checkpoint. We pulled off the road and struggled to put on whatever dry clothes we had in our packs. Then, we turned around and descended as the first grey-black morning light gave breadth to our narrow headlight beams.
It was cold, and I think I had the best clothes for the descent. It was hard to judge how cold Peteris and Christi were, or what to do about it. With increased cycling speed the sound of the rain increased in volume to double-forte. On the few up hills that were there, we jumped off our bikes and ran to prolong the heat generating phase of our ride.
At the base of the gorge, riding along the historic highway, we got warmer, and what seemed like imminent hypothermia retreated in my mind. The race director met us, and then he drove ahead to make hot chocolate at the finish line.
Our finish was in disarray. We all headed in our own directions. Rugged individualists, ending a rugged 22.5 hour outing. We have lots to learn about being a team.
Besides the great scenery and experiences, I set a personal record for the greatest quantity and weight of wet gear. There were three plastic garbage backs full of soaking wet stuff. Great memories and another story for other long outings.
photos from the race: flickr.com/ledusledus
Tags: Adventure Race, Gorge Winds, team verve