Team Outdoor Extreme takes second place in Idaho Supreme Adventure Race by Jason Bagby

TEAM OUTDOOR EXTREME TAKES SECOND PLACE IN THE IDAHO SUPREME ADVENTURE RACE Team Outdoor Extreme members include Captain, Jason Bagby, and teammates Carla Bender, Duane McDowell, Kirk Burgess and our support crew Tom Hagood and Matt Cox. We made the drive from Los Angeles to Driggs, Idaho for our very first Expedition length adventure race. The 18-hour drive out from Los Angeles was uneventful except for the speeding ticket that I got in Utah. I didn’t drive again after that.

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We arrived in Driggs two days prior to the race and were immediately greeted by Dr. Bill and his staff. We spent the next two days at the Intermountain Lodge/Race Headquarters organizing our gear which we had organized a dozen times before we left. Team Bad Dawg from Sacramento who we had raced against in the past was fascinated that we could spend so much time staring at and discussing our gear. First big race gitters I guess.

On the Aug 3rd at around 6:00 p.m. we had our pre-race meeting at the local high school. There we found out that we would have only 12 hours to plot and route the 27 maps that would make up the 400 miles of the racecourse. We choose to do all our plotting and route choices before the race. Many other teams chose to do only half, figuring that they would need a break mid-race and didn’t want to start the long week already sleep deprived. In the end we got one hour of sleep before the race. The race started at 8:00 a.m. with the town’s half marathon foot race. The foot race was held in memory of the original settlers of the town of Driggs.

The first leg of the race was Mountain Biking, and although we had decided to just “roll out and warm up slowly” we found ourselves going out faster than we thought we should with Kiviac, Ann, Ron and Dina from Team Bad Dawg and Ruben and Chino from Uruguay racing as Team Dark Dawg. The banter with these other teams was light hearted. Initially the terrain was flat and easy. We were in the middle of a large valley and had about ten miles of country back roads to ride to get to the mountains. A large group arrived at the first checkpoint (cp) together. After that, the field started to thin out a bit.

The scenery in the Big Hole Mountains was beautiful, we saw a lot of bear tracks and enjoyed the company of the other teams. The mountain biking was just incredible. Long climbing fire roads mixed with crazy downhill single track. Kirk from Texas wrecked after CP 2 on some of the single track and broke his rear brake lever. This made the next section of downhill very hard to negotiate with just his front brakes. Needless to say Kirk ate it quite a few times. Once he flew over the handlebars and into a group of boulders and seriously injured his knee. Luckily we were near a stream and we stopped to take care of it and then moved on a little more cautiously. We arrived at the first transition area (TA) only slightly rattled from Kirk’s mishap. The medic said that he needed a few stitches but Kirk decided not to get them and we headed off again.

It was late in the afternoon when we started off into the trek, Carla, Duane and I were all feeling pretty good. Kirk however was having a hard time with the altitude and his knee injury. So Duane and I alternately helped Kirk with his pack. We hiked through the same Big Hole Mountains. Next we headed down to the Snake River Valley. The trekking was fun. Just lots and lots of climbing. We were still jockeying back and forth and bumping into team Bad Dawg and Uruguay.

Sometime around 12:00 or 1:00 a.m. it started to rain and Ron from Bad Dawg and Kirk from our team were starting to feel the strain of the altitude. We decided to bed down out of the rain for an hour. After the break we headed up toward the summit of Mt. Garns. We made the summit around 5:30 a.m. The view from the summit was spectacular, just a totally beautiful scene and sunrise. We could see for miles in every direction. On the way back down we ran into team Santa Fe, Adidas and Blade Runner. We exchanged hellos and then we headed out quickly.

The last section leading into Ta 2 was a long fire road that slowly descended into the Ta. I remember getting what Duane aptly named the sleep monster visit. Duane is a rock and has completed several expedition length races. He was always a good source of knowledge and someone we turned to routinely with questions. It was all I could do to stay awake. Duane showed me a technique that he had used before. So with that I wrapped my wrist in the back of his pack and proceeded to basically sleep walk the next few miles into the Ta.

We Came into Ta 2 sometime in the early afternoon on the second day and transitioned to the horseback ride. The horses were a welcomed relief. Each team got 2 horses and we alternately took turns riding and hiking. We decided to keep Kirk on the horses the entire time hoping that would help him acclimate to the altitude without having to put out to much energy. The horses took us up through the Snake River Range, where we summated Fogg Mountain and Fourth of July peak. From the peak we had a panoramic view of the Tetons.

We ran into a group our outward-bound students and got one of them to take a group photo of us in front of the Teton Mountains. The guy who took the photo thought it would be funny to cut all of our heads off and just take a photo of the mountains. I have to admit when saw the photo I thought it was a little funny, although now I wish we had that picture. Little did we know that would be the last photo of all three teams together.

The ride/ hike back down to the Ta was uneventful except for that one of the horses stepped on my foot while I was helping Kirk mount his horse. This would prove to not be a good race for my feet. As we got back into the Ta I checked my feet and was surprised to find that I had two large blisters on the insides of both my big toes and I was starting to get blisters on the outside of my heels and balls of my feet. I was even more surprised when Ron came over to inform us that Ann from their team was dropping out due to blisters on her feet.

We were all shocked but knew that they had to be pretty severe. I choose not to have a look at her feet for fear that mine might actually resemble hers. We headed off into the night for another long and grueling hike. The sleep monster visited everyone during the night and we all had bouts of sleepwalking. Finally, when the majority of the group could no longer go on, we decided to bed down for a couple hours of much need sleep. I think we were all out within seconds of crawling into our sleeping bags…. We awoke to a cold river crossing followed by yet another long trek up and over a pass. By mid-morning we had reached waterfall canyon.

True to its name, we saw a huge waterfall. We hiked up to the waterfall to get the cp. Ron from Dawn had been having a really rough night of it. He threw up many times and we all helped share his load. He is a very strong athlete and it just goes to show you that altitude can hit anyone at anytime.

At three days out he had not been able to keep much food down. We were greeted at the waterfall by some of the 4Winds support staff and it was at this point that Ron made the decision to drop from the race. We were all sad to see Ron drop out and we each in turn said our goodbyes to him privately and told him that he would be missed. We were headed to the summit of Mt. Baird at over 10,000 ft. and we all knew that it would be next to impossible for him to continue on and we knew he was making the right decision but it didn’t make it any easier for us or for him.

Everyone headed off midday for Mt. Baird, with one less member of Dawg. All of us silently trudged along knowing that this race was taking a toll on the racers around us and that we still had a very long way to go.

Chino from Uruguay was suffering from a reaction to poison oak and his lower legs and feet had swollen to enormous proportions. Kirk was still feeling bad, my feet were badly blistered and getting worse every day and Dina from Dawg was starting to feel the effects of sleep deprivation. But we also knew that if we were going through these sorts of things that the teams behind us would be experiencing the same or similar problems.

On this particular leg of the race we had been instructed to carry our climbing equipment and 75 feet of rope due to the severity and steepness of the climb to the summit of Baird. When we got to the saddle that led to the summit we took a short break. After the break we decided to forego putting on the climbing gear. As we headed up with the remaining members of Dawg and the Uruguay team we scrambled on all fours up the mountain.

We wisely decided to spread out in hopes that if we dislodged any of the loose rock the others would have a better chance of getting out of the way. Several times I heard someone yell rock only to look up to see one or more rocks tumbling down the side of the mountain. It was a real wake up call to be climbing up the side of the mountain. Near the top there was a short section of maybe 5.5 climbing and then the summit. Dan, the course designer, and more of the 4Winds staff met us. He ask how we liked the climb up. I think half the group liked it and maybe half the group didn’t. Either way the view from the top was worth it.

We headed back down and made a crucial decision that would affect us in the coming hours. We could go along the trail, which was maybe 7-10 miles long, or take a short cut down into Hell’s Canyon. From the summit of the Baird, Hell’s Canyon looked to be an easy decent down a long open valley to the trail. We decided to take the short cut. Big mistake!!! It was definitely shorter but it was also steeper and the entire canyon was nothing more than a washed out riverbed of golf ball to car sized boulders. There was nothing easy about the decent. Everyone had to at some point scramble down near vertical fields of rock and scree. Often times this would start a mini avalanche that some of us found to actually be quite fun. If you positioned yourself just right you could kind of ski down the scree.

Carla and Dina were having a hard time with the steepness of it all and we tried to slow the pace down and help them along as much as we could. However, we all felt the urgency to get out of Hell’s Canyon before the sun set. At some point during all this, Dina from Dawg started to loose her balance and complain of tunnel vision. Kiviac and I alternated taking her pack and tried our best to keep moving. We realized more than ever that stopping was just not an option.

As the canyon got narrower we found the only real way to make any progress was to go straight down the middle of the river. However, even this was tough going and we all spent plenty of time picking ourselves up from falling in the river. Finally, after pushing down the canyon for a couple of hours and locating an animal trail high above the river, we hit a man made trail. At that exact moment Carla got her foot caught between two rocks fell and twisted her ankle slightly. Carla’s the lead navigator for our team and one of the most mentally tough women I know, but she’d had a hard time up in the canyon. We stopped to soak her ankle in the river for a few minutes. In the end we saved maybe an hour but we were all much worse for the wear.

After hitting the trail we still had a hike of several hours to the next Ta. During this time Dina’s tunnel vision and problem with balance continued to worsen. When we got in to the Ta, Kiviac and Dina decided to drop out of the race. We had enjoyed each others company throughout the race but it was time for Outdoor Extreme and Uruguay to go on without Bad Dawg.

Next we spent time eating and getting the boats down to the water. The medic helped me with my feet. He injected Tincture of benzoin into my blisters. Duane warned me that this would sting a bit, as he was intimately familiar with the procedure. I had no idea how bad it would be. It didn’t hurt when it went in but about thirty seconds after the injection I started to feel this burning sensation that continued to build to an almost unbearable pain. The whole time the medic was pressing the skin of the blister back onto the wound area. I remember half seriously and half jokingly cursing the medic for the pain he was putting me through. Carla and Duane thought it was pretty funny and laughed at me. We often resorted to laughter in the trying times. Even I managed to laugh about it after the pain went away. After the wound care session we saddled up to the boats and headed off into the palisades reservoir for the three-hour paddle to the next transition.

The paddling was great. Just wide open spaces and pure glass for the first few cp’s. But, on the last two-mile paddle into the Ta we were hit with massive headwinds that virtually stopped us in our tracks. Three-foot whitecaps came up and Dr. Bill in his ski natique came idling by to see how we were doing. “You guys are lucky, it gets worse in the afternoon” he later told us in the Ta. We left the Ta and headed into another trekking section feeling invigorated from the paddle. This was a very long section of the course for us. It seemed as if the cp’s in this section were further apart than in other sections and we all found ourselves getting frustrated with the length and the lack of sleep.

We hiked all through the night stopping only once to sleep for a couple of hours. Chino from Uruguay seemed to be getting worse. Ruben informed us that Chino had been having some serious stomach cramps and diarrhea during the night. Chino never, not even once, complained. He just kept putting one foot in front of the other. I think Duane summed it up best when he said, “if I’m ever in a survival situation where I’m lost and must survive, and I could choose one person to be with…. Chino would be that person” Chino was just unstoppable.

We woke in the morning to more trekking. This is where we started to have some problems with our navigation. We took a wrong turn and descended into a canyon in the wrong direction. The only thing good that came out of this was that we were all close to being out of water and we stumbled across a shallow stream. Even though there was cow dung all around the stream, we decided that it was worth the risk. We filled up, took a short break, studied the maps and then found our way back in the right direction.

As we headed down out of the hills, Kirk started to feel the heat. We came upon a stream near the base of the mountains and decided to get some relief from the heat. We wadded in the cool stream before trekking for what seemed like hours. Finally we came into the transition. Tom and Matt, our support crew, greeted us. Without them this race would not have been possible. They worked tirelessly through the whole race to make sure that we had everything we needed. We thought that we still had a pretty good lead on the closest teams, so we decided to take a break and get an hours rest. However, that was easier said than done. Bees swarmed the entire area, and even though we were dead tired, we found it next to impossible to actually get any sleep. After a restless hour we decided to get ready and get out onto the next leg of the race. As we readied our bikes we were somewhat shocked to see team Karma come in. They were closer than we thought.

We headed off into the early afternoon into a long mountain bike section. I guess the old adage, time flies when you’re having fun, does apply to adventure racing. We had all thought that it had taken maybe two or three hours to get to the first cp. But, after checking my watch we realized that it had actually taken almost SIX hours to get there. The sleep deprivation was really starting to warp our sense of time and space. But we just kept trudging along. Pedal stroke after peddle stroke. We biked all night long and into the morning.

We climbed and descended in and around many mountains. The mountains seemed to never stop. We were either climbing or descending. Nothing was flat or easy. I remember coming down this beautiful valley and began thinking to myself we must be getting close to the lake and the next transition area. After talking with Carla I realized we still had a 3000 ft climb up and over yet another pass before we hit the downriver paddle section of the course. As luck would have it, it was the hottest part of the day. We filled our water bottles and bladders and then headed off and up the mountain. After a good hour and a half we reached the pass and were greeted by not only a beautiful view but thunderstorms that were headed right for us.

So, with lightning blasting down all around us we headed off into the storm. We figured that a fast moving target would be harder to hit so we all pedaled hard down the road to the palisades damn and the next Ta to paddling.

We rolled up to an unassisted Ta and quickly transitioned into paddling. The next 40 miles of downriver paddling was gorgeous. Kirk and I had a great time with our hallucinations. I hesitate to call them that because you really knew that what we were seeing was not real but it still tricked you into for a second believing it might be. Just long enough for me to ask Kirk if he saw the same thing that I was seeing. Every twist and turn seemed to reveal something that just wasn’t there. The dialogue went something like “hey, does that looks like a gorilla, or does that look like a woman holding flowers, or does that looks like some old car submerged under water?” The latter might have been real. But we’ll never know for sure.

We paddled up to a sixty-foot waterfall to get to the next cp before heading down to table rock and the 500 ft. rappel. Team Karma had passed us somewhere on the bike and we were able to catch up to them at the top of the rappel. When we got there, Dan, the course designer, was talking with an irritated and somewhat unfriendly Karma, telling them he could not let the remaining two members rappel without their headlamps because it was getting dark. The two remaining teammates were forced to hike back down to the water and either come back up with their headlamps or take a time penalty. They opted for the time penalty. I went down first, then Carla, followed by Duane and Kirk. We packed up and headed out for the last hour of paddling and on to the next Ta and the final leg of the race.

We came into transition and Karma was still there. We ate quickly and prepared our food and mandatory gear. But, we decided that we were in no shape to head out right away and postponed our departure until 3 a.m. While we slept two of Karma’s team members left the Ta with their crew person. They were severely penalized for this. When our crew woke us we quickly got up and out of transition.

The last bike leg turned out to be by far the most epic of the race for our team. We were all feeling the effects of 5 consecutive days of racing with less than 12 hours sleep. The first long climb up into the mountains from the river saw several of us falling asleep while riding. It’s very hard to keep your bike in the upright position while climbing and sleeping at the same time. This was pretty comical. We would constantly have to yell to each other or yell at ourselves to stay awake. However we pushed on and felt better when the sun came up and warmed our bodies. We started having a really hard time with our navigation at this late stage in the game. We took longer to make decisions and were less sure of ourselves in those decisions, we came to what we thought was a cp only there wasn’t one to be found. This is when Karma showed up. We decided to go one way and they went another. In the end this is where we lost the race. They made the right decision and we made the wrong one. We headed off in the wrong direction then ended up doubling back to the same place we had been to earlier and after much deliberation realized our mistake got back on track and continued on to the next cp. The next few cp’s went smoothly. The 2nd to the last cp was atop a radio tower mountain. We had a 1000 ft hike and bike section to the summit. We got to the top around 11:30 p.m. and decided to get a couple of hours of sleep. At 2:00 a.m. we were up and headed down the mountain. This section of the course was incredible. It contained mile after mile of downhill single track. We headed out along this killer trail with nothing but blue skies and single track in front of us. We all had a blast. At some point along the trail we saw a large black bear with a cub in tow. Thankfully, they were on the other side of the stream and running away from us.

The trail descended back down to the valley floor. From there it was an easy but bumpy ride back into town. The last few hundred yards of the race were filled with emotion for the entire team. The long hours and days of the race behind us, we all looked forward to the finish with gratitude. We crossed the finish line in the early morning on Saturday. There is nothing on earth like the feeling you get when you cross the finish line after a race of this caliber. Even with the 12 hr penalty and controversy surrounding Karma’s actions in the race we knew we had placed second in the race.

We did a quick mandatory gear check, took some photos, and cheerfully headed out for breakfast. We were proud and pleased with our race performance. The Idaho Supreme Adventure Race was a great race put on by some really dedicated people. Team Outdoor Extreme is looking forward to racing the Supreme next year.

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