I travelled down to Temple Bar, AZ with Dave Russell, Kimberly Shavender and Murray Maitland to represent Mergeo at the Desert Winds Adventure Race along the shores of Lake Mead.The race started with a 2km run along a bearing, then swim to a small island in a cover nearby, where we would receive our maps. I was introduced along the way to Lake Mead mud, which almost swallowed me up, and I had to make a hasty retreat back off the beach on my hands and knees. The first segment was a trekking/swimming rogaine. We got off to a poor start when we got to the first control and could not find it, spending far too long looking for it before we gave up. Apparently it was eaten by a burro earlier. A bit flustered, we decided to skip the second CP to get back on track (almost all the CPs were optional in this race). We hit CPs 3 and 4, both six feet under water along the shoreline, then headed back to the Transition Area (TA) for the next leg. A very intersting part of this race is that Lake Mead has fallen 100 feet in the last five years, and the maps that we have do not accurately reflect the shoreline, so we have to draw in where the new shoreline is.
The second leg was a long kayak, then a trekking rogaine. We set up a towline on our kayaks that worked very well and kept us all within talking distance, which we used throughout the race. We hit the first kayak CP(2-1), then carelessly overshot the second one. When we realized where we were, we headed back, and passed by a dozen other kayakers who had followed us going in the wrong direction. Back on track, we headed into the trekking rogaine, aiming for the bonus "off the map" CPs that were worth 2 points each plus a couple others (2-3a,3b) then looping back to the kayaks. We hit a couple other inlets to get CPs close to the water, then headed up a slot canyon into the washes behind it. By now it was quite dark. We aimed for CP 3e to the north (we should have gotten this from the north on the bonus CP loop more easily). At that point, we decided that we needed to save time for all the "mandatory" CPs in the last leg of the course, although they ended up not being as mandatory as we thought. Another mistake was not seeing CP 2-3i, which was close to our kayaks. If we had been paying more attention, we probably would have gone for 3h,3i and looped back to the kayaks, leaving only a couple of the distant CPs unfound.
Kayaking back to the TA, we arrived at just after midnight. The last leg was a sequence of CPs that needed to be plotted with distance/bearing rather than coordinates and then gotten in order (it turns out that it was only mandatory to get 6 out of 8 of these). Kayaking around the point to get to CP 3-1, we turned the corner too sharply and ended up in a small inlet several hundred meters from the CP. Although we recognized this reasonably quickly, we ended up going overland to get to the other CP rather than via kayak, which slowed us down a little. At CP 3-1, we got the coordinates for the last mystery CP. At this point, the smart teams (DART) went back to their kayaks and kayaked a couple kms to the bay where they were going to end their loop, then hit CP 3-2 from there (which in fact, was even a little closer than CP 3-2 was from CP3-1). Most of the rest of us went overland. We moved about 20 minutes per km over uneven broken ground. Our navigation was fairly spot-on here, with the exception of CP 3-6, in which we dropped into a gully that slowly took us too far left. I recognized that I didn't know where we were, but I somehow thought that we would be funneled into the saddle that we were looking for; however, the saddle was between two east-west valleys, not two east-west ridges, and so we ended up being funneled out of where we wanted to be, and had to climb most of a kilometer back up to the CP. That was definitely a low point.
Next, we ran down a wash to an inlet to get the "swimming" CPs. This required about 2.5km of swimming, which we could have avoided if we had moved our kayaks. However, the morning was getting nice again, and we almost forgot we were racing as we boogied along the water. We swam back to our kayaks (remembering where we put them at 2am), then headed on in to the finish. We finished at 10:15am, which was almost two hours early, so we could have definitely picked up some of the optional CPs in leg 2. I think that we were 5th out of 16 co-ed teams.
I feel that I learned a lot on my first 24 hour AR. We made a lot of errors in navigating, we could have saved some weight on swimming gear, we misunderstood some of the directions, our route selection could have been better and we didn't even notice one CP on the map. However, we did hang in there together and have a good time, and it was a excellent and beautiful course, so overall I was quite pleased.
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