Odyssey BEAST of the East

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Ropes Course

Corey Rosen / 24.10.2005

As Simon River Sports approached the Ascent, they had a considerable lead over the rest of the course. The first person on the team to climb took over twenty minutes on the tricky 200ft. climb. After a short walk on the top of the ridge, they found the Rappel set up in a different location than anticipated. When the ropes crew surveyed the site this morning, they found large amounts of Poison Oak growing out of the cliff wall and moved away from the hazard.

The second place team, Team 101 - E-CAPS, began the ascent around one hour after Simon River Sports had finished. It was thought they might gain some ground if they had stronger climbers, but after they reached the top of the ridge, they were passed by Team 104 - OLN Goals ARA.

Even with three ropes for the ascent and the rappel, a bottleneck formed at the bottom of the cliff and at the top of the rappel. Teams tried to work around this problem by asking if they could skip it and take a time penalty. But with the time penalty being six hours per person and per event uncompleted, that made a 24 hour penalty for skipping the acent and another 24 hours for skipping the rappel. Not surprisingly, every team decided to move forward with the bottleneck in their way.

With the ropes section of the race creating a loop, after the rappel, teams made their way to CP4, the same spot as CP3. Since most teams tried to close the gap between them and the teams in front of them during the ropes section, they took longer at CP4 then they did at CP3.

Ahead of them is a seventeen mile trek followed by a long biking section, including a first for U.S. adventure racing, a bike orienteering course. This section of the race combines the navigation skills of orienteering and the singletrack skills a good mountain biker and should prove to be challenging and fun.See All Event Posts