Raid the North Extreme
Summing it Up
Pete Dobos - Team Adrenaline Rush / 03.07.2007
The first leg was a flatwater paddle down the Skidegate channel from the Haida Cultural Centre. The weather was sunny and cool and calm: as perfect as one could hope for. Teams left at 0600 in pairs of inflatable Tandem Tomcat kayaks, carrying their packs as well a hefty gear-bag with extra food and water. The Tomcats were comfortable and virtually untippable, as well as self-bailing, which was all very nice. Rather less nice was the fact that they manoeuvered like white-water daggers, meaning that if you didn't watch them every single stroke they had a tendency to want to spin in circles. Most teams completed the paddle in 3-5 hours, as per estimates, and quickly transitioned to the first mountain trek to CPs 2 and 3.
Mountain trek to CP2 and CP3
Teams started off on an 11 km jog along a gravel road beside Trounce Inlet around 1000. The weather was still sunny and quite warm. After about 5 km, we could see the weather tower on the mountaintop at CP 2 (3500 feet). Getting there was another story. Finding a passable route and not getting cliffed-out was the major challenge on this leg. The 50,000 topo maps had 100-foot contour intervals, so there was plenty of room for hefty (impassable/fatal) cliffs to hide along your planned route. It became an exercise in going in the direction you wanted, getting cliffed out, then either backtracking or scooting left or right as the terrain permitted and trying again. It was slow going, dangerous at times, and made tracking your progress on the map quite difficult. The nice thing was that we could always see the mountain where we were trying to get to for CP2.
The first trekking CP was on a mountaintop at 3500 feet with a stunning 360-degree view and teams that managed to get there during the first day with the clear weather were well rewarded. The challenging route-finding countinued on the descent from CP2 and was followed by a blessedly flat bushwhack to get to the next set of mountains. Finding a safe route up to the ridge that most teams planned to follow into CP3 was if anything more difficult than reaching CP2. All but the top 4 teams were caught by nightfall before being able to get onto the ridge, and many elected to hunker down for a couple of hours of sleep / shivering instead of trying to find their way up the extremely steep and often slippery slopes in the dark.
The top 3 teams (Yukon Wild, Sole, DART-Nuun) managed to make it to CP3 before full dark, which was an awesome feat. They completed the trek in 9-12 hours. Team SSS made it in later that night and those 4 teams were the only ones to complete the trek in time to continue on to the northern part of the course. Several other teams arrived during the day on Tuesday, having spent a night out on the mountain and were redirected to bike directly to CP11, back at the Haida Cultural Centre. Several teams spent 2 nights out on the trek, and a few others simply could not find a safe route though the trek and were picked up. The average time for the teams that completed the first trek was about 26 hours, which was significantly longer than was expected and many teams ran out of food.
SleepMonsters
