Oct 20, 2007
Some will call it the Lake Hodges race. Ironically it was meant to be in the Laguna Mountains but the venue changed due to the extreme fire danger. However, the day after the Desert Rage race at Lake Hodges the Witch wildfire roared under Interstate 15 at Lake Hodges and tore over the south side of the lake (engulfing checkpoints 4 and 9). Two days later the coastal winds fanned it back onto the north side of the lake (through checkpoints 1 and 10). When this report was written I am unsure if the entire north side of Lake Hodges burned or not.
We were fortunate to have a nice day for the race with clear sky’s and warm temperatures. EQUINOX fielded two teams with Steve and Kristine training for the Patagonia Expedition race being a little (actually a lot) faster than Barrie, Juliana and Delta. Delta is new to racing in California after racing in the flat of Minnesota, and she commented on the hills a number of times in the race. Juliana could not make the race at the last minute as her daughter was ill. We stayed as two teams with Kristine and Steve coming in 3 rd overall while Delta and Barrie were mid-pack.
The race started with a choice; paddle about 1.5 miles (I had it at more like 3½K round-trip), or run about 4 miles. Not being great runners we elected to paddle and completed this section before the elite runners, so made a good choice. From the TA this section took us around to the houses on the north shore of the lake to get a small foam ball (and your passport stamped).
Returning with the foam ball you had to balance it on a golf tee (yes, that very small – less than the size of a dime, golf tee) and walk around a cone. It was only about a 20 foot walk but with pumping adrenaline it was difficult to balance the ball. Each team member had to balance the ball and traverse the course, then we were given co-ordinates for the bike (section 2 - 20K) and kayak (section 3 - 12K).
Delta and I plotted quickly, which was good as she had never plotted before, but that also hampered us as the easterly co-ordinate was 6 digits with the northerly 7 digits and I told her to tell me the first 4 digits to get my kilometer grid and the remainder to get the location within the grid. This caused us to plot the first bike CP as xxxx700 east rather than xxx070. So we raced off to not find the first bike CP. There were no other racers even close to us and that was suspicious so we revisited the plotting and had to go backwards up the hill to CP3.
Finding CP4 was simple as we plotted it correctly and I knew the area. But it was interesting in that there were a couple of “short-cuts” which were both out-of-bounds according to the official map, and which never went through. But we located CP4 efficiently and were off to CP5. We had to cross a main road to go to Kit Carson Park for CP5 and had some fun as there were many more trails than marked on the map. But topography easily showed a drainage area and we went directly to the checkpoint.
CP6 was my favorite. In training on the mountain bike we always go on the rutted trails and have fun riding the dirt. And there was a 3K dirt trail to the checkpoint. But now we are racing and must use roads which show about a 2K paved (yuck) ride. However, as we were riding the roads you could see that the trail was on the other side of a 6 lane road and rather than riding up to an intersection then back to the CP, we waited for traffic and crossed the road, went down an embankment and were exactly at the CP. We made up 3 or 4 places in that one quick decision.
Buoyed by our success there, I talked Delta into cutting through the housing to get to CP7 which was on Bernardo Mountain. Bad choice, as we could not really see the topography on the map and there was a huge hill we had to ride over. Plus we were unsure how exactly to get back into the park and the advice of locals did not help. So we lost about 5 places there, but did get back onto the course and found the CP easily.
Determined to get our position back I again talked Delta into cutting through the houses as we continued west back to the TA area. We neither gained or lost race time (though we did not know the way and could have been faster had we know where exactly to go, but for the future I do have a shortcut).
At the end of the bike was the second Mystery event which was to construct a pipe system to fill a pail with water. After building the pipe you had to run back and forth to the lake to get water and overflow the pail. It was lots of fun though we never made the most efficient pipe system.
Then we were off in the kayaks to CP9 and CP10. They, of course, were at opposite ends of the lake. It was a long paddle, but Delta is in-training for Baja Travesia, so it gave her an idea of what to expect with flat waters (in this race, probably not at Travesia). We had no problem finding the checkpoints and returned to the TA early afternoon to get coordinates for the trekking.
With a 5 PM race finish we had lots of time to plot 5 points and go to them in any order. We chose the “easy” route in a clockwise loop of the north 3 points, which proved to not be so easy. We ran into homeowners who were appalled that we were running through “their” property. It was actually the fire break in the park, but they have gotten to consider it their property. After the fires this week they will no doubt wish to extend “their” property lines.
So we had to backtrack after getting the first point, but managed to find another trail to the top of the hill and get the remaining two points in the north sector. By now we were running with a number of teams. Some were actually ahead of us as they had already gotten the southern points. Some were doing the northern points in a counter clockwise direction and some were in a head-to-head battle with us. Being good Adventure Racers we chatted, gave good advice and watched for our opportunity to charge ahead and beat them to the finish line.
We helped one team get the eastern trek point and met up with two other teams at the punch. We were all off to the last point together. While we took different routes to the final CP, we all punched within seconds of each other and then it was a scramble to the finish line. Two teams (us being one of them) backtracked to get off the hill, and the other two continued down and around by the boat-ramp. I was pretty sure we had taken the quicker route and indeed, while Premier Pools (Matthew and Bobby) out sprinted us to the finish line by 35 seconds, we beat soloist Kevin English and 3-person Team ODP by 3 minutes.
It was time for pizza, a lot of liquids and packing up of gear after a really fun day of racing. The faster Equinox team finished in 5½ hours, it took us 7½ hours and the last team took almost 9 hours to finish. We had a total distance of about 50K and an elevation gain of just 3400 feet.
A big thanks to Rick, Kim, Sierra Adventure Sport, all the volunteers and the sponsors who allowed us to have a fun days racing in an area now devastated by wild fires.
