Another summer...another MSAR. Reed and I did our first one in 2016, an 8-hour affair which was then 13-year old Reed's first. Now, we were about to start his 6th 24-hour race. This year the race was based out of Bethel. We drove the 2.5 hrs up and checked into our hotel and scoped out the quaint downtown with it's historic New England charm.
After a decent night of sleep, we loaded up on an obscene amount of Dunkin calories and headed to race check-in at Gould Academy's Pine Hill MTB and XC trails. We waited in line for maps and actually had plenty of time to map/plan our tentative race approach and complete any final readying.
At 10:00 we were off, along with 45-50 other teams. The finish line was back here in 24 hours: 10:00 AM Sunday. The first leg was a fairly short orienteering leg on the trails around us. There was no one way to attack these, which helped to split everyone up. I had a few navigation stumbles in the first 30 minutes. For some reason, this happens to me at the start of most ARs, before I hit my stride navigationally. In this case this only cost us 15 minutes or so. We trotted and hiked around the trails for ~75 minutes in order to pick up the 10 checkpoints (CPs) here.
Although the race weather was not scorching hot, it pretty warm and very humid. We were already sweating a lot and dipping significantly into our water stores in order to stay hydrated. * Here is the part in my race report where I again point out that there are 9 lovely months in New England in which the woods are not full of heat, humidity and insects. These are all great months for adventure racing. *
Next we hopped on our bikes to begin the first bike leg. This would take us all the way from Pine Hill past Sunday River, over 33 miles and almost 6 hours. After a little hilly road riding, we tucked into some ATV/snowmobile type trails. These were not made for bikes but were pretty easy to ride and the navigation was straightforward from the maps we'd received. The teams were still pretty clustered at this point but we managed to scoot ahead a bit and bust back out to road. We took a southern loop on road to get one more CP before heading back through Bethel and up to the Bethel Community MTB trails. These were very nice bike trails - many machine-built and bermed out. There were long sections of swooping turns interrupted up uphill slogs in the heat. We managed to collect all the CPs here without delay but only with a bit of luck. It was pretty much impossible to closely navigate on the small trail map while safely zooming along the singletrack. A few of the CP flags were right on the trail but several times, I was lucky to glance in the right direction at the right time to spy a flag deeper in the woods or under a bridge. So I learned to take my time on the trails and keep my head swiveling about when I felt we were getting close.
Then we popped out onto pavement near Sunday River ski area, riding pleasant flat roads parallel to the scenic Sunday River, stopping for CPs at a cute covered bridge and a waterfall. Following this, we climbed for a while on dirt road toward the trek. Along the way we couldn't resist a quick dip in the adjacent Bull Branch to rinse off the sweat, omnipresent bugs and cool off a bit. Randy Ericksen caught sight of us and snapped a few pics.
We were soon back on the bikes feeling genuinely refreshed - definitely worth the little bit of lost time. We climbed a bit more to reach TA1 in the Mahoosuc State Forest to begin the big trek of the race around 5:00 PM.
Here we had access to our gear bin containing food and other refueling supplies. The absolute highlight was an Italian wrap we bought at Hannaford on the way up, topped with some incredibly satisfying garlic pesto aioli out of a plastic squirt pouch.
We set out on the trek with conservative goals. We wanted to be out of there around sunset (8:30 ish) to allow plenty of time to tackle the subsequent bike leg which sounded quite intense. First we grabbed the 2 easiest CPs, adjacent to the central logging road/trail. We didn't do this super-efficiently but well enough. The lowlight was me falling down during a stony river crossing and finding out later that I had lost our only compass with adjustable declination. So we had to use the backup compass for the rest of the race, and there was a LOT of remaining compass work on this leg and the next.
We confirmed that the woods here were like a lot of the woods in Maine and Canada - in regrowth from fairly recent logging. This results in a dense brushy growth of various shrubby things, raspberries and saplings. On an orienteering map this would all be light and dark green.
Next we headed up a fairly steep reentrant for a lengthy attack on CP 31. We opted to curtail this slow, brushy leg and just go after 2 more CPs before heading back. The next target was CP 32. We found this without any problem other than withstanding the super slow dense bushwhacking. From here, we decided to hit CP 33 and then head back into the TA. CP33 was at the east end of a prominent ridge and my plan was to head south, perpendicular to the ridge and then eastward, along the ridge to the CP. Unfortunately now it was getting dark, further limiting visibility in the dense brush. When we started to definitely descend while heading south, I assumed we had hit the ridge and began to head along the soft ridge we had found. In reality we were nowhere close to far enough south and we wasted a fair amount of time exploring this area. The problem was that the visibility was so limited, you could never get a sense of the surrounding topography beyond 30 feet or so - a constant state of uncertainty.
Soon enough it was clear that we had no way to determine where exactly we were and needed to move on - we bushwhacked scratchily due east back to the main road and then south back to TA1.
It was now about 9:00 and full dark. We ate some welcome "real" food provided by the organizers - a little mac and cheese and chicken and contemplated our next move. The trek was sucky and slow - a bad way to spend race time, so we weren't heading out for any more CPs on foot. We would leave on bike, but we still had 12+ hours of race time left. We knew the last 2 stages (paddle and trek) would take about 3.5 hours total, which left a good 8 hours of time for the upcoming bike. According to the race instructions we had 2 options at this point
1) Attack the notorious bikewhack we had been told/warned about. We knew this would probably be like the abrasive rugged trek we just did...except with a bike...uphill...for several km. We had very little enthusiasm for this option at this time. This would give us a shot at finding at least a half-dozen hard-won CPs.
2) Ride around the bikewhack by backtracking on the roads we used to get here (TA1) - easy road riding but no CPs gained. This was a comfortable and attractive option but it felt kind of wimpy. Also, we'd arrive at the paddle too early to even start it (5:00 was the earliest we could get on the water).
There was also a hybrid option that most teams ended up choosing (get a few of the CPs near the start of the bikewhack and then ride around on road), but this didn't seem great to us at the time.
After much vacillating, we accepted that the honorable thing to do was to do the bikewhack. We decided to go straight through to the bikewhack route and not attempt any of the CPs prior to it, because they looked to be on crappy steep trails and we didn't want to underbudget the time required for the 'whack in case navigation got weird - a very real possibility.
So, we sped off down the dirt road toward the 'whack. After a small amount of generally uphill roads and minimal nav uncertainty, we turned onto ATV/SnoMo type trails of progressively lower quality, picking up a CP along the way every 30-60 minutes. We were walking the bikes at this point - there was never rideable trail that lasted more than 50 ft. After another hour of this, it was time to leave the trail and continue onward through the rocky, brushy forest, with our bikes, strongly uphill for several km. This was exactly as bad as we expected. It was really humid and this bikewhack required near-constant shoving, maneuvering and disentangling your bike, uphill. Our slow-moving bodies and headlamps also provided easy targets for all of the local insects, several of which we inhaled.
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| Climbing up a vertical riverbank after first hoisting up the bike |
To stay on track, we had to follow a small winding rocky creek, switching to the left or right bank depending on what looked the most navigable. Sometimes we used the creek bed itself. I kept an eye on the compass, making sure we were staying on track, This was interrupted with lots of water breaks since we were constantly sweating. We kept refilling water bottles in the handy creek. We don't treat/filter remote mountain stream water, so that sped things up.
Looking back at our GPS track, this 1.4 mile bikewhack took us about 3.5 hours, including a 15 minute backtrack on foot to find CP47. Time went by pretty quickly, being constantly focused on finding the best way to move forward for the next 10-15 feet and cursing the race designer. We climbed about 800 feet in elevation to reach to highest elevation and location of CP47. We could tell by the absence of tracks around the CPs that we were the first ones over the pass.
Once we were over the top of the saddle, things cleared up a bit, bush-wise. I directed us west for a bit through some marshy level ground and then on a direct SW bearing toward where the map suggested we would likely find some kind of road. This all went very smoothly and soon enough we had found the road - a fairly overgrown doubletrack affair. We followed this, and its continuations, in a generally south direction for a long time - dipping for a while over the border into New Hampshire, as dawn gradually broke. Then it was east on flattish pavement for several miles to reach TA2 - the start of the paddle - around 5:45.
We shared a sixer of mini-donettes and suited up for the paddle. We were assigned a tubby tandem kayak, which we loaded up and headed down the nicely flowing MSAR fave Androscoggin River. This leg was pretty pleasant overall. We had 5 CPs to find along the way, primarily located on river islands. When we got to the first one, there were lots of teams milling around talking about their troubles finding the CPs. After a quick look, I just decided to bail - it sounded hard and seemingly required a decent bushwhack. After the excoriating trek and bikewhack, I just didn't care to dig out this flag, so we left and headed downriver. In retrospect, this wasn't a bad decision - plenty of teams searched for a while and never found it.
The next 4 CPs were much more straightforward and we coasted into the final TA, having seen 10+ miles of the Andro in a bit under 3 hours. There was a bald eagle sighting, the only significant wildlife we spotted during this race.
We transitioned quickly and completed the next section - a couple miles on foot through Bethel, recording a few Q&A CPs on the way back to the start/finish line, including an inspired sprint across the finish line! There were delicious breakfast burritos here. I had consumed about 500 calories total in the last 6 hours, so this was fantastic. SoMe brewing also supplied some AM libations - ahhhh.
All told, we logged about 72 miles and 7k feet of gain. Our slow and steady approach was good enough for 9th place overall and 3rd among the all-male teams. We were very happy with this outcome.
We'd like to give huge thanks to the whole of the Strong Machine crew and all the lovely sponsors and volunteers.
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