For Blue Ridge we again teamed up with Mark Bell, our teammate for the last three years. Mark’s wife Lorie, brother-in-law Casey and son Andrew were there to support us. We received our map and race instructions on Friday night. We’ve been racing in the Blue Ridge area for many years and know it fairly well; still the Race Director, Ron Zadroga was able to come up with some new challenges for this year’s course. We nick-named this race the “Cemetery AR” because many of the checkpoints (CPs) were located near old and abandoned cemeteries in the Lake Blue Ridge area. The race also had a 10 hour finish time. Any teams finishing after the 10 hours no matter how many CPs they obtained would not be official finishers. The course was also Rogaine style which means we could collect CP punches on our passport in any order we wanted.
During the pre-race dinner on Friday we plotted 18 CPs on our map. That is a skill that requires a UTM plotter and accuracy. We always double check every plot; otherwise we could be looking for a CP in the wrong place. They are hard enough to find as it is. The other four CPs were provided to us 15 minutes before the start of the race on Saturday morning. Our primary strategy was to paddle more than bike, but we couldn’t be certain of that until we received the last four CPs on Saturday morning. We were also required to preposition our bikes Friday night at Tilley Church near Persimmon Hill and Tilley Bend as in Toccoa River bend on Old Dial Road. This is a fancy way to say on a dirt road.
Saturday morning, 15 minutes before the start of the race we received the coordinates for our first four CPs. For the first three we had the choice of CPs A, B and C or D, E and F. ABC were in the Free Knob area and closer. Don’t know if or why any teams would have picked DEF. We had a pretty good climb up to A and a steep down hill to B. That section took us about an hour and a half on foot.
That took us to our bikes which were at WP1 (a waypoint doesn’t require a passport punch) and decision time; how much to bike, how much to paddle. Friday night we had decided on paddling and stayed with that decision. Many teams made the same choice we did and many teams decided to primarily bike, which was probably the wrong strategy. From WP 1 we biked a short distance to CP1 and then CP3. From there we decided to go by foot to CP4 and skip CPs 5 & 6 because they required big climbs and we were more concerned about the 10-hour finish then punching every CP. This is where things went awry. CP 3 to 4 was due west about 4/10th of a mile. The vegetation was very thick and progress was slow and it seemed farther than we actually traveled. After 25 minutes, thinking we might have missed the CP we want back to CP 3 and started again. Again we did not find the CP. After looking an hour, we decided not to waste any more time looking. If we had we gone another 250 meters we would have found it.
We rode to WP2 and arrived there by noon which was our original goal time to be there; however, we were one CP short of our goal. We were not very happy about that, but we eventually got over it. At WP2 we dropped off our bikes and picked up the canoe and portaged about a half mile down an awful trail to the lake to CP 2. Since we were going down hill it wasn’t all that bad. We had the option of putting a bike in the canoe, but didn’t want to deal with the three of us and a bike in the canoe. We probably could have obtained one additional CP had we brought the bike with us.
We basically paddled the entire length of Lake Blue Ridge, 10 miles or more. We had planned 4 hours to get the WP4 but during the paddle decided we need to be at WP3 by 3:30pm instead of 4pm, a very good decision. It was a short paddle to CP7 then a longer paddle to CP 8. CP 8 was the most difficult CP placement in the middle of a bunch of fallen down trees but Zach and Mark found it rather quickly while Cathy stayed with the canoe. This lifted our spirits after the CP4 fiasco. We thought about portaging to CP 9, but decided against it and made the 2-mile paddle instead. We quickly obtained that CP, but the clock was ticking.
We had another long paddle to CP 10 and then portaged up a nasty trail to a nice dirt road. It was about a mile portage down the dirt road to CP 11, but we cut off 3 miles of paddling. By the time we reached CP 11 we were definitely running short on time and decided to skip CPs 12, 13 and 14. We went straight to CP 15 and then arrived at WP4 at 3:25pm. We refilled our fluids, ate some food and picked up our helmets, or so two of us thought, for the next paddle section. As we paddled away Andrew came running down the beach with Cathy’s helmet which was required on the river portion of the paddle. We still had a 2-mile paddle to the dam, but did have all three required helmets.
When we arrived at the dam we had to portage up one side, that was a killer, and down the other side. We had another 3-mile paddle down the river to the take out. This paddle took about an hour. It was longer than we anticipated because the river was shallow and we kept getting stuck on rocks. At 5 pm we arrived at the take out and still had a half mile portage and a 5-mile bike to the finish. We put our wheels on the canoe quickly and going as fast as we could arrived at the bikes at 5:25pm. We were really concerned about finishing by 6 pm at this point and flew in and out of the transition and took off down the road on our bikes. The only problem was we had to ride a half mile on railroad tracks. That doesn’t work very well even on a mountain bike and really slowed us down. At the bridge over the river Mark punched CP 19 and then it was only a short distance to a paved road. It was a flat out sprint from there to the finish. However, there was a lot of uphill; so progress was a little slower than we anticipated. A hundred yards form the finish line we had to drop our bikes and run to the finish line; which we did.
We finished at 9 hours 50 minutes and 39 seconds with over eight minutes to spare. We came in 40th out of 74 teams, 7th in our division. We were among only 42 teams that finished in the required 10 hours and received the distinction of official finisher. Not too bad for a team with a combined age
of 165 years.
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