Members of the Dirty Avocados were all over the place.  Brian was at Untamed New England, DP was racing with Galen, Will is getting ready to have a baby. Abomb just opened a business and Doti was being a race volunteer.  This left Angel and I to race as a 2 person team at the 2010 Gold Rush 24 Challenge.    We were racing under the name of Big Blue in hopes of winning some sponsorship dollars. 

 Mark, Adrian and their crew always put on a very well thought out, challenging and fun course.  As they say, it is not a race you will finish in24 hours.

There was a very good field but the class of the teams were the Yogaslackers and DART/nunn.  Angel and I were just looking to run a solid race.

The race started with a paddle O course where we would get bearings and distances at each checkpoint on the lake.  The teams were divided in to 2 groups - an A group and a Z group.  We were in the Z group with the Yoga slackers and DART.  We paddled well.  DART and Yoga got turned around on the bearing and we pulled a significant lead over them.

We were 2d off the water and after a very quick transitions, including loading the boat onto the car, we were off on the bike.  We rode hard up to Crandell Peak, almost 3000 above.  We picked off the CP’s as we continued to ride hard through Strawberry and were working our way to the TA when I began cramping. The last climb was 2300 feet, mostly on exposed pavement.  I chased Angel up the hill but really suffered with massive cramps in the major muscle groups.

We finally got to the TA, still in the lead.  however, that lead was short lived as Yogas and DART pulled in within minutes.

After a quick TA, we headed out on the trek towards the ropes course.  We ran down the hill and instead of following the road bush whacked straight  up the mountain.  We moved up the mountain as fast as we could and eventually found a downhill mountain bike trail that lead us to the main road.  A slight misdirection and then back on then right path hitting the CP at the top.  We hustled down toward the ropes running into DART.  DART beat us into the CP just as Yoga was getting onto the ropes.

The repel was a fun 200+ foot dropping down a rocky face.  There were 2 ropes.  I took the more aggressive route which included a short overhang.  This was Angels biggest repel ever so she was a bit nervous but handled the rope work without any problem.  After getting ff the rope and traversing over to the spine we affixed on to a rope for a jumar assisted climb back to the CP.  This was a beautiful repel with a wonderful view off towards Pinecrest lake.

After the climb we gathered ourselves and began heading to the canyon.  There was a waypoint at the junction of the rivers.  I took a quick bearing and began down the ridge.  We ran into a bike trail and followed it a ways.  I sort of lost track and we followed it too far.  The long and short of it was the decent was tricky requiring many down scrabbles and bush whacking through nasty Manzanita

It was getting dark as we finally got down to the river.  We were too far to the West of the way point.  As it was getting dark we by passed the way point and headed straight up the mountain towards the next CP that was located at the top of a ski lift.  It was a long hard climb but eventually we made it.  Just before we got to the CP we were caught by the Brazilian team including our local friend - Jen Klifflin.  We got to the CP and quickly moved on while the Brazilian team took a break. 

We bushwhacked down toward the road that would lead to CP 10.  The bush was nasty and scratchy and tore our legs up.  Even though I tried to stay on the compass moving in the dark around the various obstacles we hit the road father west then I had planned .  We walked a ways till it became clear we needed to turn around. We quickly adjusted and found the CP 10 in short order.  At this point time was becoming an issue.

Looking at the map we realized that we would have to skip CP 11 in order to give our selves a chance to get all of the bike CP’s..  The map showed a horse trail that went from CP 10 to CP 12.  We couldn’t find the trial head so we just started bushwhacking along the creek.  After a while we ran into the trail and moved on at a good pace.  We arrived at the TA at the base of Dodge Ridge Ski resort around 3:30am.

After a quick transition we were back on the bikes and climbing.  We had a trouble finding CP 14.  I missed the turn off and we did some extra climbing.  Just as the sun was rising we found 14 and started working our way through the check points.  There was a lot of climbing and many of the down hills were rocky and sketchy and slow.  It was taking us a long time between the CP’s.  The cut off for finishing was 2 pm and the clock was running.

We had decided that we would have to skip a few CP’s including 21.  We were moving as fast as we could and our navigation was solid but this was a very long bike ride.

As we were heading to CP 22 we came to the last bail out point.  We had only 2 hours to finish.  I was beat.  We took the bail out and finished in just over 29 hours.

When the finally tally was done we were 3rd overall.

Gold Rush had a great course.  The swag was great - a really nice long sleeve tech shirt, an engraved pocket knife and a nice personalized finishing certificate.  The organization was great and everyone was very nice and very helpful.  The Gold Rush is a must do race every year.

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