Our race started with a loud canon blast and a frenzy of paddles and canoe’s bumping as the 42 teams frantically tried to make headway in the mass water start. We started with a paddle orienteering course. We were going to paddle 40 miles during this leg which was interspersed with 6 miles of portaging. We had portage wheels which worked nicely for the road but couldn’t be used for the forest portions. Portaging through the woods took a toll on Joel and Jason as they had to carry the heavy canoe (and they weigh in at 150lbs/each so no brute strength on this team). I tried to lessen the load by carrying all 3 of our heavy backpacks.
There was a conservation project along the paddle to build a trail in the marsh. I carried a large log and the boys carried a long plank that we nailed to the last section of the trail. When night came we found ourselves paddling in the rapids, I wouldn’t recommend navigating rapids with a just headlamp. There were a few scary moments. We heard several teams flipped their canoes in the chilly water so we felt pretty lucky. 
We made our way safely to the first transition which was another conservation project. We had to traverse a loop and nail permanent markers on the front and back of a tree. Next was the dreaded orienteering relay. It was now late on our first night and I was going to go first. I am not an “orienteerer” and have a terrible sense of direction. I only had 3 points to find; I found 2 pretty easily but struggled with the 3rd one. The boys had no problems with their part of the orienteering relay but my struggles lost us a few positions in the standing. We came into that transition in 20th place and arrived at the next transition in 22nd place. Our next transition was at a Fire Station where we changed our wet clothes got a quick plate of spaghetti from the firemen and were off on our bikes. It was now daylight and we were feeling good. The biking leg became challenging pretty quick with some steep climbs and unfortunately not the enjoyable fast downhill’s. We had to hike our bikes through the forest in deep mud and dense foliage for the downhill. Then we headed for the ATV trails which in no way matched the ATV trail map we had. We spent hours climbing impossible rocky, muddy overgrown trails looking for an elusive checkpoint. On one of those downhill’s I was trying to skirt a deep mud hole and my bar ends caught on a tree branch, it stopped my bike suddenly and I landed in middle of the mud pit. Nice huh? After hours of searching we finally found the elusive checkpoint. We heard that the Ecuador team entered Canada while trying to find one of the bike checkpoints and was detained because they forgot to bring their passports (at least we didn’t do that). We were on our bikes from 7am to 2:30 Friday afternoon.
We entered the next transition still in 22nd place and next would be the long wilderness trek over several mountain peaks. We dropped off our bikes and changed our shoes, filled up our camelbaks and were off. At this point Joel turned over the orienteering maps to Jason. Joel and Will normally share the orienteering. But Will was out due to injury. We headed down the road to a dam where we hoped to cross but couldn’t, and then we had to cross the rapids. I struggled due to my height and worried with the white water hit my hips and I had a heavy pack on ..but somehow I made it across. We were climbing steadily up with hopes to get as far as could before nightfall. We were looking for checkpoint 15 and started bushwhacking through deep brush heading to the peak of a mountain. What we didn’t know is that we were not where we thought we were on the map. We went up and down the dense underbrush. Jason finally turned the maps back over to Joel after several hours of searching but there was no real way for Joel to determine where we were on the map at this point. We followed streams hoping to find a known point but there were multiple streams on the map. Finally at around midnight we realized we had no way of determining where we were on the map and could not go forward. We were lost. We decided to call headquarters to see if they could give us our coordinates from our spot tracker and that resulted in a DNF for the race. They sent a local guy to meet us on a snow mobile trail but we still had some difficulty finding that trail because the spot tracker coordinates were not coordinates on our map. He resorted to blowing his horn (a lot) so that we could hear it and get a direction of travel. We finally hiked to his location at 4am.
We were disappointed that we could continue but to be honest I was feeling nauseated and we didn’t have enough food to finish the 15 to 20 more hours of hiking until we would reach our gear bins and food. We raced hard for over 36 hours and we have to appreciate that our bodies and minds could endure that challenge.
There were 9 teams that dropped out and 2 more that had 1 racer drop out due to illness so we weren’t alone.
There will always be next year.
No comments:
Post a Comment