COWBOY TOUGH TEAM TECNU RACE REPORT BY KYLE PETER photo credits Randy Eriksen Extreme Worldwide Photography
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This year’s Rev3 Adventure Cameco Cowboy Tough 3.5 Day Adventure Race was part of the Adventure Racing World Series. With the first place prize of a free entry into the World Championship race in Brazil later this year, the competition was fierce. During the race brief for the first and second editions of the race, Mark Harris had promised a tough course that would challenge the lead teams racing for the win along with the back-markers, but we finished each day’s stage with plenty of time to eat, prep for the following day’s stage, and get some real sleep (most of the time a full nights rest!). Thus when we gathered for year 3’s
Course details Day 1 32-45 miles trekking 10-15 miles single-track biking 10-15 miles paved road biking 10-15 miles gravel road biking 15-20 miles flatwater paddle Total distance = 80-110 miles Day 2 60-70 miles fire road biking 30-45 miles off-road biking 24-50 miles trekking Ropes section Total distance = 110-150 miles Day 3 40-60 miles gravel road biking 30-60 miles double-track/singletrack biking 5-40 miles trekking Total distance = 75-160 miles Day 4 60 miles paved road biking 20 miles gravel road biking 3 miles trekking 3 miles Class III paddling Total distance = 76 miles
Grand total distance = 330-400 miles
race brief in Casper, WY, we all snickered amongst ourselves when Mark proclaimed that this course was hard and would have us pushing to make each day’s time cut. ‘Yeah, right!’ we thought. We looked at our race maps already, measured the distances, crunched the numbers, and conservatively we can get through each day with a good 4-6 hours rest each day. The previous 2 years racing from Laramie to Casper and from the Wind Rivers to Casper showed us how fast the Wyoming roads and trails can be. Navigation, although not simple, was straight forward. Mapped trails were always were we expected them, off trail travel was fast, bike roads were often paved or very hard packed gravel. Trails were dry and kept feet happy. The added 4-6 hours of rest every day would also help keep our speed up as opposed to the ARshuffle pace that creeps in on Days 2 and 3. Well… We were flat out wrong. I don’t know what Craig at the ARWS told Mark, but Mark stepped up and had a challenging course worthy of being a qualifier for the World Champs. Navigation was complex. Mapped trails often didn’t exist, were very faint, petered out, or were full of blow down. Hello, hike-a-bike!! Oh and swamps!! Day one saw us spending the morning with our friends and sometimes teammates Dart-NUUN. We did a number of short run and bike legs along with a circumnavigation of the only water between Buffalo and Casper. We also did some ridiculous ‘challenges’ that are more suited to an obstacle course race than an expedition race. It is hard enough explaining the sport to other single sport athletes to gain the respect that the hardest endurance sport in the world deserves, but once shooting whiskey, collecting bullet shells, grabbing a ribbon off of a calves tail, and signalling with flags is involved it’s all over.
Early in the afternoon we started the meat of the day – a 35 mile trek with 7,000 feet of vertical through the BigHorn National Forest reached altitudes of 10,000 feet. We did most of this trek (until sundown) with team Swedish Armed Forces. These guys are a fairly new team composed of members of other top ranked Swedish teams such as SilvaHagloffs, Sweco, AXA (Peak Performance), and FJS. It was comforting to know that although we were struggling at times on the hot climbs they were content to stay behind us. It seemed as though they were working hard to maintain our pace. Just before the sunset we lost contact with the Swedes. This also happened to be the time that we left the well establish Penrose trail and made our way to Gem Lake. Gem Lake proved to be a challenging checkpoint to reach that forced many experienced teams to walk in circles or make camp and wait until the sun returned. Also the time cut to start Day 2 was at 8AM, many teams missed this and were put onto a short course with no chance to catch teams ahead. The mapped track from the Penrose trail to Gem Lake didn’t seem to exist. We followed the compass from the junction of the Penrose trail and a signed wilderness area boundary directly to Gem Lake and our next checkpoint. We walked through swamps, boulder fields, around ponds, and finally found a track that generally followed our bearing right to Gem Lake. The 500m straight line bushwhack probably took us 2000m to walk as we weaved in and out of these objects. The next goal was to follow another questionable track down 3,000 feet to the End of Day 1 Camp. This proved to be another great challenge. Now completely dark and in an open meadow with no signs of a trail, the team searched for a cairn, trail sign, track, or anything that proved to show hopes of a trail off of this high alpine meadow. Not finding the track would have resulted in a slow and labor intensive bushwhack down very steep terrain. Fortunately after a few minutes we found a cairn that lead us to a track that descended the mountain. We lost our trail 3-4 times on the way down and across a number of creeks, but teamwork prevailed and we always found it again until we didn’t… We found ourselves trail-less on the side of a mountain in thick nasty vegetation in middle of the BigHorns. It is not so much fun to walk on off camber terrain on sore feet after spending all day hiking with a 20 pound pack crossing creeks every couple kilometers!! Who would have thought that Wyoming had so many swamps! We spent 10-20 mins looking for the trail to no avail and continued sans-trail. After 500m
or so we came to a restriction in the terrain where the trail should have traversed and sure enough we found it again. We came into transition around 3AM and spent the next 2 hours on and off our bikes negotiating the ‘trails’ around the Paradise Ranch before coming to Day 1’s End of Day Camp at 5AM and rested and refueled for 1 hour. A thick fog rolled in as we set out on the start of Day 2 at 6AM. We left with 20 hours of food, warm clothing, and our ropes gear in our packs on a 26 mile trek. For those of you keeping track this is essentially putting us on a 60+ mile trek leg between Day 1 and 2. This provided for some sore feet on a leg that was more straight forward than the previous night’s tramp, but still challenging and in low visibility. We continued to travel south through the BigHorn National Forest and after a painful run on 5k of pavement led by Mari we came to Crazy Woman crag and our ropes course. We made short work of the rappel and hopped on our bikes to begin a 120 mile ride. It was early afternoon on day 2, and we had just spent the better part of 24 hours walking with wet feet. It felt great to be on the bike saddle and give our dogs a break, that was until we started up Crazy Woman Creek, and our trail turned into the thick blow down that required us to hike our bikes up and over countless logs. The terrain was thick along the creek and it quickly became clear that our direct route utilizing this trail was going to be slow. As in 1kph slow! I sat down in the woods with my bike tangled in the pine trees and my feet screaming for relief. I knew we needed a change of plans or the cut off to start day 3 would be unreachable as we still had 98 miles to go!! JPop took a gander at the maps and suggested pushing our bikes up a steep hill way above the river and the overgrown trail to a ridge that could offer some thinner woods to push through. This got me thinking, and I noticed the hill on the opposite side of the river had some mapped 2-track roads and would actually be a short cut to our next control. Jason
led the charge. We forded the river with bikes overhead, pushed up the hill in a grassy meadow, pushed through a bit of woods, and in no time hit one of the 2-track roads. Our race was saved!!! We had moments of riding our bikes over the next 20-30 miles but we spent the majority of the time pushing them uphill on steep overgrown trails. Made me really miss the enjoyable riding we had in Alaska just 2 weeks earlier. But the pushes were rewarded with 2 fun descents from 10,000 feet. The 2nd of which was our introduction to Wyoming mountain swamp bike bombing. It’s fun once you get the hang of it… Keep your butt back and stay off your front break. After a full afternoon of bike pushing and swamp bombing we got to spend the evening descending on paved and smooth dirt roads in a steady rain. We dropped and dropped until we left the rain clouds behind. All of that descent needed to be regained, and we started biking up Rome Hill. We are now deep into night 2 without any sleep. It is possible to push through 2 nights w/o sleep in an expedition race, but not advised. We had no choice as we had to make the start of Day 3’s cut off. Jukebox Mari, caffeine gum, RedBulls, and silly nonsense were deployed to keep us all awake and moving forward up the darkest, most boring road in Wyoming. Somehow we all stayed upright on our steads and were treated to a glorious sunrise as we continued on rolling roads into the TA. Now shy of a few brain cells, we left for a short trek, but it was clear our crew needed some shut-eye. We went to End of Day 2 Camp at 9AM and gathered up our supplies for the next 12 hour push. We started Day 3 at 9:30 with a 1 mile bike ride were we found a sunny patch of grass and proceeded to refuel and take a 90 min snooze. We got back on the bikes at 11:30 and started to navigate ranch roads on our way out of the higher peaks of the BigHorns and into the red clay high desert region. I had a mental daydream moment shortly after
our nap, and I thought more time had passed than actually did and brought the team up to the wrong pass. Thankfully the open nature of the terrain and yesterday’s experience with the off-road biking allowed us to continue without having to backtrack and lose all of our elevation gain. Pretty sure we scored a ‘first descent’ on that ridge as we followed a few cattle trails. Back on track we weaved our way down to Outlaw Campground above the Middle Fork of the Powder River on some of the most fun, bumpy roads we saw in the BigHorns. After leaving our bikes and scrambling down to the river we returned to the campground to feast on burgers and drinks provided by NYARA. It’s amazing what some ‘real’ food can do for the spirits and the body after eating packaged gas station snacks for 3 days. Leaving Outlaw found us entering some new terrain as we dropped into the valley north of Willow Creek Ranch. We found ourselves off course as we travelled in the valley. No problem once again as we were now seasoned pros at riding our bikes over anything! This time we cruised over the desert landscape nailing small cacti praying that our sealant would keep us puncture free. We enjoyed the rest of our ride through the valley that evening finding many unmapped roads that took us right to the control locations. We came into TA around 9PM and quickly put our shoes on for a fun orienteering loop. We were now on a map with 20 foot contours instead of 40 foot so we had much more detail to navigate off of. I felt bad for my team as the navigation was much less team oriented on this section and more of a follow the leader walk in the darkness. We managed to stay awake (mostly), and after 3 hours we walked into End of Day 3 Camp and rewarded ourselves with 2 hours of sleep and more burgers and hot dogs cooked up by the race staff. Mari’s 3:15AM alarm was only heard by her and her shouting and hitting our sleeping bags did little to rouse us, but we eventually came to and packed up for the final day of racing. At 4:05AM (a bit late due to
pumping tires that were low on pressure after our cactus riding) we rolled out on bikes in the darkness for a mostly flat slog towards Casper. We had a substantial lead on all of the other teams and really just needed to finish the days stage to win the race. To pass the time we rode side-by-side with the YogaSlackers sharing pulls into the wind, snacks, and stories. After 70 miles we rolled into Casper in the late morning and had a nice leisurely stroll on the Casper bike path with our pack rafts. Our final task was to float the Casper Whitewater Park. Mari, Abby, and I went in a small 2 person dingy while Jason paddled a one person raft. I felt like a child as the three of us bobbed up and down through the waves laughing the whole time. The take out was a happy sight, and the 4 of us crossed the finish line with our third win in a row at the Rev3 Adventure Cameco Cowboy Tough 3.5 Day Adventure Race!