Eaglin Adventure Racing: Doing the Dixie Conquest

Well - sometimes races go great an sometimes not. This ended up being a very tough race for us. we had a string of errors that were recoverable and one that was not. The team was Jim Gorton, Courtney Spratt, Junos Reed and myself.

We started with a short orienteering run and quickly established a lead by burning through it in 27 minutes an getting out of the transition to bike very quickly. Our first mistake came with hitting Bayard Road and me going the wrong way because I never looked at the North Arrow on the map. I realized the mistake and we made it out to the paved road and tucked into a bike line and literally flew down the road - but we lost about 15 minutes on this mistake.

At the boats we decided to head south first and picked up the points pretty easily. CP10 was a really cool spot at the end of a small creek shown here. The remaining controls were straightforward - and also led to a lot of jokes about big root balls (clue one CP).

Heading back north to CP8 the frontal system that had been coming in turned into an all out gale which gave us some pretty challenging paddling. Waves were cresting at about 2 feet, but the wind (and cold) was the real issue and it really slowed our pace down as we headed to CP8. I had figured since we passed a lot of boats that we could get CP8 and be back with the lead pack as we left the boats. This was not going to be the case.

The hard rain and surprisingly cold temps had me shivering quite a bit as we came out of the boats at CP8. We attacked CP8 a little south of the control, but checked the direct location (with 3 of us scouring the area) very well. After that we simply searched further and further from the mapped location. I even went in the duckweed covered canal (about waist deep) to see if I could get a better vantage on the control. No luck in finding the control even had me doubting our overall location we did a little northern leg just to be sure. Since we had been told at pre-race the course would be hard to clear - we licked our wounds and bailed on the control.

The bike ride back had a few CP's. There was a 2 CP bikewhack that we went around, but found from some of the riding, the bikewhack would have been better. The only control to give us issues was CP16 due to a parallel unmapped trail. From the footprints on this one - we were not the only ones to have an issue with this. We again realized our mistake and corrected - had I measured the maps (we were given these on the fly) I would have realized the mistake and hit the correct trail. Also this is one spot where a little familiarity with the park would have been useful.

We made it back to the main TA where we picked up our next set of bike controls, and also our shoes for the second trek. On the way to the trek we stopped for the tower challenge. This was pretty fun - I was in the tower calling out bearings to my three team-mates while guiding them to the control that I could see from the tower - but they could not see from the ground. If Jeff posts some video of this - I'll put a link here - some of the teams were hilarious.

When we got to the foot section I calculated that we would be able to finish the race with a solid hour to spare. We moved pretty well through the foot controls though there were some challenging ones - especially CP22 which had a drawn trail that did not match the actual trail.

Here are some highlights from this section - one nav error - when we left CP18 I did not recognize the trail leading to CP19 so ended up going to the sand pile to re-orient. The battery in my tracker gave out just before CP23 (it only lasts 8 hours) - but you can see that we were on the right track there.