Desert Winds Trip Report (Dave's)

Here is a trip report from Dave Russell, one of my teammates:

Desert Winds was a very cool race! The terrain was very bizarre. Once a desert, then the Hoover Dam flooded vast areas of land - and now it's turning back into a desert.

The race director is a very savvy guy who put together quite the brain puzzle of a course. He started the race with verbal instructions to head on a bearing of 286 for 2.5k. There you will find the maps on a small island. We had to swim out, find the maps and plot in the field.

A burro had eaten the first checkpoint, so everyone wandered around for quite awhile before giving up on it. I was a bit too stubborn and probably looked for too long. There was a short trek that included coasteering where we used our small inflatable rafts and fins. Two of the checkpoints were along shorelines and underwater about 6'! We skipped one of the 1st optional points because of time wasted on the burro thing. Then, it was back to the TA and into the kayaks.

From there it was a 15k paddle along a crazy complex shoreline that was hard to read on the map - because the water line in lake mead is about 60' below normal. There were only two mandatory Kayak CPs. The rest were rogaine style with 13 optional CP's. You could trek/kayak/swim to get them in any order. It was a very interesting nav puzzle that involved kayaking to a pullout, treking to a group of CPs, then moving on to the next section. Several of the CPs were "off map" and involved following written directions only. One section had a really nice slot canyon (in the dark). We ran past a buzzing rattler & almost put a hand on a poised scorpion.

All the CP's on the third trek section were mandatory, so you had to calculate your rate of travel while doing section 2 and leave the rogaine with enough time left to make sure you could get section 3 done before the noon cutoff.

Back to the TA around midnight, we took off again on a short kayak to the next section. These CP's were all given in bearing/distance format from the previous CP. So, if you plotted one wrong, the rest would be wrong too. We took care plotting. But, in the dark I managed to get us into the wrong cove anyway, so we had to trek a bit further and do some rock scrambling.

After about 5 hrs of trekking in the dark thru washes, gulleys, ridges and scrub, we got the sunrise and ran
around the desert for a few more hours. Leaving CP-5, a minor course deviation that led us into a wash became a major error when plunged deeper and deeper and led us down the wrong drainage, which nearly cost the CP.

Finishing up the trek, there was about 4k of swimming with the rafts, with the last CP on a very dramatic tiny island with a spire on one end - which Miles climbed in his slippery neoprean socks. Then a final kayak to the finish. Turns out we could have been more clever about managing the kayak/swim choices to avoid the long swim. But, frankly, it was really nice being in the water that morning.

There were lots of creative ways to solve this course. We left about 5 markers on the table because of the time cutoff - so totaled about 26.5 hrs on course. That got us 5th place. I know our team expectation was higher, but it wasn't my finest hour navigating and I made a bunch of mistakes.

The course was very cool and the company great. So all and all it was a really fun race.

Here's a link to the coursemap:
http://hatchcam. com/desertwinds/ coursemap08. html

and a Google Earth .kmz
http://hatchcam. com/desertwinds/ desertWindsCours e08a.kmz

Dave