The Rock Climbing Center/ Front Range Climbing Company Adventure Race

Lianne has been jonesing to do an adventure race for quite a while.  The Rock Climbing Center and Front Range Climbing Company put on a race over the weekend that was affordable, close to home, and looked like it would be fun, so we decided to give it a shot.  The race consisted of mountain biking, orienteering, a tyrolean traverse, hiking/running, blackjack, and kayaking.

It was actually a lot of fun and, to my surprise, we actually won the entire race.  There were about 70-100 people, all team entries except one soloist (who we leapfrogged back and forth with for much of the race).

The start didn't go so well.  Lianne and I were messing around with last minute details.  I got impatient and rolled over to the start to see what was going on and right then everyone took off!  Lianne was about 100 yards away at the truck.  So, we essentially started in last place.  We hit the Sante Fe Trail and Lianne started to pick up the pace.  Eventually we passed everyone and were first to checkpoint 1, along with the soloist.

We were also together at checkpoints 2 and 3.  We had a heck of a time finding checkpoint 4 and almost everyone caught up to us.  Eventually we found it close to the previous checkpoint.  After a couple more checkpoints, we hit the hub and got the map for the next leg.

The next leg was the big one.  Up Mt Herman, then around the backside with lots and lots of checkpoints.  We messed around a bit reading the map at the hub and some more people passed us.  We got started up Mt Herman Rd and Lianne said, "alright, let's hammer."  Ouch, she put the hurt on me and a couple times I actually asked her to slow down.  I didn't think I could keep up that pace for 4 hours.

We passed lots of people and finally pulled up to the old shooting range with a handful of other people.  We all looked around for the checkpoint when a woman said she saw some ropes across the valley.  Sure enough, there was a tyrolean traverse set up.  We hoofed it up the trail, dropped our bikes and hiked up to the traverse.  Li and I ended up arriving 1st and 2nd, which turned out to be a huge advantage.

As we donned our harnesses, they put the finishing touches on the tyrolean traverse.  I hopped on first and made it maybe 1/3rd of the way before having to haul myself across with my hands/arms.  At one point, Joe offered me a rope.  I said no and just finished hauling myself across.  Lianne was up next and didn't get very far before she had to start hauling herself, too.  Joe offered her the rope and she said no.  I told her to take the rope, because it was quite strenuous to pull yourself across.  She took it and was pulled across.

People had already started queuing up at the tyrolean and this turned out to be a huge advantage for us.  Later, Jeff said they had to wait almost 45 minutes to get across the traverse.

  

I recognized the next checkpoint, so we bushwacked over the ridge, down a steep hillside and quickly found it.  We ran for some cover and scoped out the next checkpoint, which was in the meadow up high on Mt Herman.

We hoofed it up the trail to the meadow.  The map was a bit confusing with multiple trails drawn in the same area (the officially printed line being incorrect).  We ran into a family breaking camp at the meadow and Lianne asked if they had seen any flags.  They pointed about 50 feet away.  Bingo!  We did the punch and headed out quickly before anyone saw us.

The next checkpoint was listed as below Mt Herman summit.  We made a tactical mistake here, heading straight to the summit.  At the summit, I grabbed a hit of my Hammer Gel while Lianne looked for the flag.  She quickly ran into cliffs to the west.  Oops!  I looked at the map again and realized we were about 300 feet above the checkpoint.  Oh no!

We decided to work our way down the rocky/cliffy hillside.  Lianne was a bit hesitant in spots, but we finally made it down to gentler slopes, where we thought the checkpoint should be.  There was really no good frame of reference and we wandered around for about 15 minutes before eventually "finding" the checkpoint.  

Casey (the guy at the checkpoint) had seen us wandering around in circles.  I think we seriously went to the back, right, left, and front of him before getting to the checkpoint.  When we went to punch the card, he said we needed to play a couple hands of blackjack with him (which we won) and headed off to the remaining checkpoints.  He said the remaining checkpoints were basically all on trail and also told us to tell the kayak people that we could use paddles (I can't imagine how long it would have taken to go back and forth across the lake without paddles!).

On the way to the next checkpoint we heard some other racers coming down from Mt Herman summit.  We ran into them (the soloist and a 2 person team) and they said they had missed the previous checkpoint.  They weren't interested in going back to find it, which turned out to be great for us since a missed checkpoint is a 30 minute penalty.

We leapfrogged back and forth with these people as well as a larger team for the rest of the race.  This actually turned out to be advantageous for us since occassionally another team would find a checkpoint first and we could just run over and punch our card quickly without having to find the checkpoint ourselves.  Earlier, being in first by ourselves had required us to find everything on our own.

Eventually, we found all of the checkpoints and hoofed it down to the hub.  It turns out we were about the 5th team to check-in, but we correctly assumed the earlier teams had skipped checkpoints and portions of the race. 

The check-in people said to ride to Monument Lake and finish the race with the kayak.  I asked about the Pentathlon leg and they said that due to time constraints we couldn't do it.  So, we grabbed our bikes and hammered to the lake.  Lianne was putting the hurt on me and we passed a handful of people on the way.  

We arrived at the lake and went to grab our kayak's (we had brought our own, which was good since there were only about 8 total boats).  The soloist was just grabbing one of our kayaks and I asked him if he could get a different one.  He was fine with that, but I later felt sorta bad as he slowly paddled an inflatable boat across the lake, practically sinking below water level (must not have had enough air in the boat).  

We headed out across the lake and the 2 person team we had seen earlier was already part way across the lake.  We got to the other side, jumped out, waded across a small muddy pond and touched the rock.  We hopped back in and paddled back across, finishing in front of everyone.  Yay, we were done and believed we probably had won the whole thing, which turned out to be true!

A party (moved inside due to a thunderstorm) followed with Bayou BBQ and beer from Trinity Brewing Company.  Good stuff!  Thanks to all the organizers and teams.

Something we can improve upon for future races: orienteering!  I'd say we got a little lucky finding some of the checkpoints and we could have easily lost the race due to inattention to map details and direction.