Snowbird Adventure Race, Aug 16 2014

At the starting line

My second year in a row of completing the Snowbird Adventure Race, this time with Jim as his first adventure race ever!   True to form, organizers Scott and Aaron made a nice uphill course all within the ski areas of the Snowbird ski resort.  The checkpoints were somewhat easier to find this year, being alongside trails, no bushwhacking or scratched legs unless you really want to take shortcuts.   We didn't.  

We did, however, see plenty of uphills.   Our first climb zigzagged through the ski runs, past a couple of controls, all the way up to the top of the tram at 11,000 feet.    The final ridge climbing up to that elevation got our heart rate going, for sure!  But that wasn't the end of the stage, yet...first we had to descend the backside of snowbird down to the bottom of Mineral Basin and back up again.  The first climb had seemed hard...this was punishing.  And hot...the sun was beating on us from a clear blue sky.   The controls took us up and over Mount Baldy before returning to the tram, where luckily we could take the lift down to the bottom rather than needing to run back down!  

We passed through the start/finish area to start the next section of the race.  Stage 2 was the bike section, but since we only own one mountain bike, the organizers were nice enough to agree that we could run instead of bike this stage.  Considering the steep trails at Snowbird I thought being on our feet might be an advantage to pushing our bikes up the hills, anyway.   

Waiting for the tram down from the top of Snowbird

We did grab our climbing harnesses for the second stage, because part of the race included a tyrolienne traverse of a steep ravine below the Gad2 Lift.   I only made it about halfway across the zipline, though, so the final section was me pulling myself hand over hand to the other side.  Can you say tired arms?  

By the time we finished the traverse, we had missed the cutoff for being able to continue up to the final controls on the course, which were back up at the tram (again).  I think we were kind of relieved that we didn't have to hike all the way back up there a second time... as tired as we were it might have taken hours!   

So we raced for about 5 1/2 hours, and 3 missed controls netted us 6 hours in penalties.  It was a fun race, perfect weather, great scenery, and a free post race meal at the Octoberfest at Snowbird!  

Here's the results, although not much detail is included.  We are racing under the name of Anchor Self Storage.