At one point during this year’s Gold Rush I suddenly began laughing aloud to myself. Really, I chuckled, how do we end up in these situations? More importantly, why do we end up in these situations? Our team, Barely Legal/Yogaslackers, was hike-a-biking up a 45° slope that was optimistically marked on the map as a trail. Currently it was a river of mud, and for every step we took up, we’d slide a half step down. Our bikes were essentially cumbersome flashlights because there was no way we could ride most of the time. Every now and again we’d come across a hundred yard section that was rideable. Everyone would get excited, hop on the bikes, think “maybe now everything will just better from here;” then fifty feet further and we’d be off the bikes slogging in mud again.

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I was laughing because earlier, much earlier, we were trekking and Daniel complained that we certainly hadn’t got very dirty yet. Paul and I agreed, wishing for more mud before the end of the race. And now here we were with all the mud I could ever want times ten. Once, I dug a very large hole in my parent’s backyard. When it got to the point where it was hazardous they told me to fill it up and I decided that if I were going to fill it up I might as well enjoy a five-foot deep mud bath in the process. Previously I thought that that mud-bath night epitomized “muddy,” but tonight topped it all. Even for those brief stretches that we could ride, the manzanita was so close to the trail that it would pull you right back down to the mud. If I hadn’t been freezing cold, soaked through, tired and hungry that might have been kind of fun.

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Our race started smoothly enough. We made it to the start – that was a major accomplishment. Last year we wrecked the van about a half hour after the pre-race meeting and a long drive away from the start, so we spent the weekend hanging out with cops, car dealership salespeople and a tow truck driver in Oakdale instead of racing. Anyway, this year we managed to avoid wrecked the van and many other teams congratulated us on this admirable accomplishment.

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The race started on a small lake in Pinecrest, about an hour east-ish of Sonora. The morning was chilly, but not too cold, and the sun was promising a beautiful day ahead. Our crew, Katharine and her friend Julie, hurried us around getting ready and before we knew it it was 7:45am, time to head to the starting line. I love adventure race starts. The race director calls everyone over for a roll call, everyone comes over and says “Here, here, here, here,” and then the R.D. looks at his papers one last time and says “Okay. Ready, go!” And everyone goes. None of that singing of national anthems or long drawn out pre-race talks like they do at other sporting events. Adventure racing keeps it simple.

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We headed out of the start with twenty-one teams running for CP1, which was on the other side of the lake we were at. We overshot CP1 by about a half mile due to navigational misunderstandings, which lost us about forty minutes. On the way back to it we developed a secret code to let each other know when one of us spotted the CP: “Where the f*** are we?” This way if other teams were around they wouldn’t be clued into our discovery. All of us really wanted to get to say the code phrase, so we were looking very hard for the checkpoint. Finally Paul was sitting on a rock waiting for Daniel and me to scramble down from the high route we’d taken. Paul jumped up, “Where the fuck are we! Where the fuck are we!” If the other teams in the vicinity did hear him, they were probably more confused by Paul’s apparent joy over being lost than fooled by our secret code phrase. Whatever, we moved on.

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After CP1 our nav was spot-on. I should say Daniel’s nav, really, since he navigated the whole time. Every now and then he’d ask for our advice, and we’d give it, but really, Daniel was the nav hero of this race. And I thank him for that, because if he hadn’t been so on it our night in the mud could have been much, much worse.
CP2 was a breeze; we ran most of the way (anything that wasn’t rock scrambling or straight uphill) and made up a bit of the time we lost finding CP1. At CP3 we picked up bikes that Katharine and Julie left for us, and powered out for a short bike leg. Due to our little miscalculation with CP1, we were 19th out of 21 teams at this point, but we felt great and were on a roll.

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The first bike leg followed a drainage flume for a number of miles. This, in my opinion, was one of the race highlights because it involved a number of periodic sections where we had to walk on 2×12”catwalks over the flume. We decided that (a) flumes are cool, and (b) the Yogaslackers should invent a new sport to make use of the coolness of flumes – it’d be called fluming, of course. By the time we reached ACP2 we had moved up to 12th place, and we transitioned for the next trek in under twenty minutes, thanks to Katharine’s military-like hustling and Julie’s helpfulness. This trek was a long one and the rappel was in the middle of it, so our packs were full with lots of food and climbing gear.

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Again, we ran most of the time. We ran down a steep power-line hill (I spotted a sled and really wanted to slide down on it, but it was cracked up so I left it alone), then down the rest of the hill mostly on the road, cutting through the switchbacks every so often. Then we crossed a dam and followed the river downstream for a ways to hit CP9 (which was in a cable car that went across the river!) and continue up a big hill to CP10 where the rappel was. The rappel, well, we had mixed feelings. It felt rather silly to trek all the way up just to be able to have a rappel section down. And the down was all slab with nothing exciting and vertical. But then, this is the Sierra Nevada, not the canyons of Baja. After the rappel we scrambled down another 400 feet to the river, which we then crossed and ran alongside for a few kilometers to Sand Bar Flats campground, where we found CP11.

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From CP11 we had another big uphill to the top of Crandell Peak, where we got CP13. Along the way we heard a lot of rustling in the brush, so we made up a song entitled, “Don’t Eat Me Tonight, Bear.” Unfortunately I don’t remember the tune. In this section there was a lot of bushwhacking potential, and if it had been light out we probably would have taken advantage of this. As it was, dusk had just set in and it was beginning to sprinkle, so we played it safe and kept to the fire roads except for one bushwhack that turned out to be the most beautiful whack I have ever bushed because it worked out perfectly and we never felt lost. Down from CP13 there was a muddy mess of trails and Daniel was ever so meticulous with the nav. It was raining full on now and we had donned our wet weather apparel; still, the rain soaked through, making us very wet and cold. Paul kept telling us that he had forgotten what warmth felt like.

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CP14 was stocked with about seventy million cans of Pepsi, so we drank a few. Then we pushed on, and took a wrong turn somewhere in the trail mess, but luckily Daniel set us straight before too long we didn’t really go any extra distance. Eventually we reached an improved road and trekked down it for a ways while we talked about how very tired we were of this trek with its wetness and its coldness and its longness. Finally I spotted some lights, but they turned out to belong to a Christian camp so we sped up the pace and continued. Not too much farther we found CP15/ACP3 at the bottom of a hill and the end of a valley.

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Katharine and Julie had the transition area set up beautifully with a tarped area to keep the rain out (sort of). We stayed for about an hour drying off, eating, warming up and mentally psyching ourselves up to return to the unpleasantness of the night. We left on the next bike leg right as the rain began to pick up. Lovely, I thought. For the first half hour it was okay because we had dry(ish) clothes (Katharine lent me her dry rain jacket – yay!!!) and we were biking up a big hill on improved road, so we could actually ride. But after a while the rain soaked through our new clothes and we were just as cold as before. Then we hit the mud.

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Once we stopped being able to ride much it was so cold that Paul claims he was shivering straight for ten hours. We got CP16 and CP16a fine, but then we made a slight wrong turn and needed to go back to nab 16b. This is where Paul & Erica vs. Daniel began. Paul and I were both nearly hypothermic and wanted to high-tail it back to ACP3. This bike leg was long, we’d made it through about a fifth of it in four hours and the trails didn’t look like they improved farther down the line. So we wanted to forget about 16b since we’d already missed it, then keep going to 16c and from there head down to an improved road that we could ride back to ACP3 instead of continuing on the trails to CPs17-19 and ACP4. Daniel, on the other hand, wanted to go back for 16b and then go on to ACP4. There was a brief standoff in which we all knew what each other wanted to do, but nobody wanted to make a decision. At last we decided to head back to ACP3 because we were so cold that even pedaling briskly uphill we were still shivering. Also, Paul’s rear shock was broken, which made his bike difficult to ride.

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This turned out to be the right decision, I think. We ran into Mark (race director) as soon as we hit the improved road, and he seemed to think we made a good choice too – the lead teams still hadn’t made it through this section (they ended up doing it in 11hrs) and they had started it before the rain made the trails quite so horrible. In addition, going past CP16c was a point-of-no-return journey and we would have had to make it all the way to CP19/ACP4.

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It was now about 6am, and the sun was coming out. This, Daniel claimed, would warm us right up. Not so, although it did provide a very welcome relief from the thirteen hours of night we’d suffered through. We shivered for hours, even after baking ourselves with heat lamps once we got back to ACP3 and cuddling up under sleeping bags, space blankets and down jackets. Then on the drive home we woke up in a van that was 110° with the sun shining in and the windows rolled up. No more shivering after that – we were even warm enough to go home and drink multiple rounds of milkshakes…

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