Cowboy Tough - pre-race fun

Team Vignette converged on Casper, Wyoming last month, along with a bunch of fellow adventure racers from around the world.  It was finally happening!  And now I'm finally writing about it!  We were ready to finish getting ready and get this show on the road.

Introducing Dave, Leslie, Tom, (me), and a bunch of our new racing friends:

Taking over two hotel rooms with bike boxes, gear boxes, a giant paddle bag, and a bunch of gear:

I guess we have to figure out what to do with all this stuff:

The bag for the paddle gear was so large we determined that it would fit the smallest member of our team.  Although not under the weight limit.  Or without lots of giggling.

For the record, it was quite comfortable in there, no matter what this picture might suggest...

Checking in and picking up our jerseys - team #139:

Ready for the parade to downtown Casper:

Chatting and meeting other racers as we walked to downtown, following the route we figured we'd finish the race on in a few days:

John followed us downtown to get more photos:

There was a brief opening ceremony with a couple speeches, then we were given a map of the downtown streets and told to visit a few places to complete tasks and collect stamps.  Cool, an "urban race" adventure  :) We were also told that it "wasn't a race" and we weren't supposed to run.  Fine, but that doesn't mean we can't be efficient about this.

Posing for a western-style group photo - giddy-up, cowboys and girls!

Hi John, we're just wandering around Casper in bright green race jerseys and pink tops!

There was some big celestial event coming to town later in August...

Fish!!!

Tom volunteered for the bull-riding challenge, thanks for taking one for the team, Tom!

Nice video capture, Dave!  With a bit of heckling from Leslie:



Somehow we still managed to finish everything first - so we won the pre-race "it's not a race" prologue, that's fitting for an adventure racing team that has a bunch of urban race experience but is mostly out of their league in a world championship expedition race... we'll take it!  Go Team V  :)

Team photo - happy to be together and actually doing an expedition race this summer, woo hoo!

Gear check the next day, time to get serious:

Showing that we know how to rappel from a couple feet in the air:

Review of medical stuff:

Talking about bears and what to do if you see one (get big, stay together, back away slowly, have the bear spray ready, try not to surprise the bear in the first place):

Photographer Randy Ericksen getting a picture of our friend Abby lugging the giant paddle bag across the parking lot by herself:

Bike box check-in, no issues with that:

John didn't get a picture of the gear box weigh-in because he was helping us hurriedly move everything around.  A slight miscommunication and the lack of a final weighing of our boxes in the hotel room resulted in some last-minute adjustments of what went where.  It wasn't easy trying to get everything set up correctly, as we would see each box only twice max and we had to make sure we had the right required gear in the right places.  Being over the weight limit for a couple of the boxes meant some scrambling, but eventually we got everything loaded.  Phew, that was exciting.

Piles of paddle bags:

Getting instructions on the tracking/communication devices:

After an excellent supper at Racca's Pizzeria (seriously, it was really good), it was time to get some sleep.  We had a pre-dawn appointment to pick up our race maps and get on a bus.  I was really happy with this arrangement - no staying up all night before the race working on maps, and something fun to do on the long bus ride.  Dave was first in line for map pickup - we sent the right guy for this task:

Team Vignette is sort of awake:

It was a good bus ride - comfortable buses and plenty of time to go through all the many, many maps they gave us.  I was very excited to see that much of my scouting would be applicable, and interested to see the long bike route revealed along with the TA location on the west side of Pathfinder.  The course was straightforward - we'd travel from Jackson to Casper in a mostly obvious manner, no big detours, but still with some navigation to keep us on our toes.  It looked doable, if we kept moving at a decent clip.  Now, how to deal with these big piles of maps in our hands?

Approaching Teton Village:

John beat us there, getting a picture of the buses pulling up:

Last minute final packing, bathroom breaks, water fill-ups, trash drops, etc.

Racers convening in the starting area, where we were allowed to leave our packs for the opening leg (a trail run in the ski resort hills):

Yep, it's a photogenic starting ramp, now complete with the teams' flags:

So I guess it's time to actually start writing a race report...

Casper scouting

One last bit of Cowboy Tough race scouting to write about, then I can start detailing the actual race - getting there!  By the way, I'm now blogging about August (in September) so I must be making progress.

From Casper I tried to guess the last several legs of the course.  The 163-mile bike ride remained just a general idea (get from Lander to the Pathfinder Reservoir, on various gravel roads, somehow), and the TA at the end of the ride was a mystery (I made a guess but it was completely not right).  But I had a decent sense for what came next.

Legs 10 and 11 involved trekking and packrafting, and it was most logical to assume we'd be on the Pathfinder Reservoir, down Fremont Canyon, across Alcova Reservoir, and down the North Platte River.  In some combination of on the water and on foot.  John and I had a day to drive over to that area and check things out.

Starting at one possible take-out for the end of all that trekking/rafting - Government Bridge:

I liked the looks of the North Platte - good current, wide open, and as far as I could tell not many obstacles to be concerned about.  View from the likely put-in where the river flows out of the reservoir system:

The canyon at the top end of Alcova Reservoir - high and scenic, it looked like a beautiful place to paddle (or to stand on a high rock and watch people on the water):

Alcova Reservoir, popular for boating and watersports - and after seeing the more desert-like areas around Casper, I can see why people converged on this lake:

Admiring the scenery:

On over to the more-remote Pathfinder Reservoir, where we discovered a small store near the campgrounds.  I enjoyed talking with the woman who runs the store about the upcoming race.  We also scouted a water spigot here but forgot to check around the campgrounds.  Surely that won't be too important...

Quite the drop from the reservoir down to Fremont Canyon:

View of the dam from the trail that heads down into the canyon the long way around:

Cute little bridge at the bottom to make a loop to the trail that goes up to the dam on the other side (the short way down):

Vestiges from when the dam was built in 1909:

An informational sign describing an igneous dike of basaltic rock - we're always looking for signs of volcanic activity so we had to figure out what this was talking about:

So the igneous dike is apparently the wide stripe that you can see on the other side of the canyon - molten lava came to the surface through a crack in the granite many, many years ago.  Now it looks like this:

We were amazed to be able to pick it out on the other side of the bay also, heading up into the hills, once we knew what we were looking at:

A possible packraft landing spot on one side of the dam:

The beach at the base of the dam, another potential take-out:

A view into the canyon - from on top of the dam:

Yes, you are allowed to walk across the dam!  Now that's pretty cool.  And unexpected.

Heading down Fremont Canyon to get a sense of what the leg 11 whitewater might look like.  The river started mostly shallow, something we might want to portage around?

The wider valley heading for the narrow canyon - lots of shallow water and walking-the-boat opportunities:

I found this story about John C. Fremont, the namesake of both the canyon and the reservoir above it:
https://community.nrs.com/duct-tape/2012/06/10/inflatable-boating-in-the-west/

I was hoping our team would avoid any "dumptrucking of the crew and cargo into the water" during the race.

Because, truly, there are a lot of rocks in the canyon:

Maybe some spots where our rafts would be OK, interspersed with more rocks:

I was in a rather sour mood contemplating taking a packraft down through the canyon.  Lots of head shaking.  Maybe we could portage around all of it??

Looking for a possible put-in near the high bridge (the last place we might trek to from the dam), we found a possible option but it wasn't great.  The canyon was really pretty though:

The river looked deeper and with fewer rocks in this area, so that was something:

Trying to get a glimpse of the last 3 rocky sections and ways to carry the rafts around them, before the team would reach the wide-open water that eventually emptied into Alcova:

A couple things happened next.  I went into a Casper gear store and talked with the maps guy.  He sounded surprised that the race might be allowed to send us all the way down Fremont Canyon to Alcova, as there's a power plant outlet just below my photo above.  Apparently almost no one gets permission to boat through there.  Hmm, well, that's going to change some of the elevation stats for this leg of the race if we have to go around.

Also, John went back the next day to look more closely for an alternate river access spot (we had driven past one place that I started wondering about).  He took a top-down picture of the slot part of the canyon, super cool:

In the middle is a "sieve" that requires climbing over, so that was interesting to see (at least in a photo, from the top, with low water conditions):

While he was wandering around he found a checkpoint flag, pretty funny!

Even funnier was that we didn't even visit this spot during the actual race.  Ah well, it was a good try.

One last scouting mission - we drove the road up and over Casper Mountain just to see what we could see.  Nothing special, and actually I was expecting the final 33 mile bike leg to detour somewhere through the mountains because the amount of gravel listed for that leg was too much for the route to stay on the main road.  No time to play with anything besides the satellite view for that one, I figured we'd figure it out when we got there.

Oh, and then I spent a few hours focused on the first trek, when I went back to review it and realized it wasn't an obvious straightforward trail.  Yikes, that one could be a challenge!  We'll see what happens with that.

Next up - teammates arrive in Wyoming!