Primal Quest Badlands
Thieves in the Night
Team Orion Health / 20.08.2009
At the last "on the ground" report OrionHealth.com had started the "Prairie Paddle" along the Cheyenne River. They were about 10 hours ahead of the chasing group which included: Salomon Crested Butte (SCB), Merrell/Zanfel Adventure (MZ), Bones and iMOAT) who continued to swim and kayak on the Angostura Reservoir near Hot Springs in the South West corner of South Dakota. Teams that completed this part of the race course at night found the navigation difficult with inlets where Check Points (CPs) were located hard being hard to identify.
As mentioned previously there was some controversy at the reservoir about how MZ made their way around the swim course. Nothing will be confirmed until the conclusion of the race but it would seem that they are going to incur a fairly stiff penalty (anywhere from 8 to 16 hours) for using their bikes to transport themselves to points from where they would swim the least distance to collect the Check Points (CPs) and for "disobeying" the instruction of an official who asked them to wait to have their plan checked with the Race Director.
As was the case in transition at the time you can expect there to be some fairly intense debate about this between the team and officials. If a penalty is imposed it will see MZ drop back significantly in the final results after an excellent second half of the race has seen them draw slightly ahead of SCB on the course. Ignoring the pending MZ penalty, SCB are still actually in second place as they had to wait for a new SPOT tracking device before leaving the reservoir and will therefore be given a 3 hour time credit for this at the conclusion of the race.
OrionHealth.com made good time on the river although they did report that they had some difficulty identifying the shallower areas of the river and the location of electric and barbed wire stock fences spanning the river due to mist rising off the water into the cold night air. OrionHealth.com finished the paddle at 5.30am after 12.5 hours paddling and kayak pushing and decided to sleep in transition for 3 hours.
Unfortunately during this sleep someone came into the transition area and stole Anna Berthlesen's PFD and race pack along with another bag belonging to one of the logistics volunteers working on the U-Haul truck. The team did a gear inventory check and managed to scrape together replacements for almost all of the things that had gone missing. Anna had to use a small camelback pack for the trek which meant the boys had to carry a bit more of her gear than usual - apparently soemthing that they teased her about a fair bit before heading off for an 8 hour, 20 mile trek along the Cheyenne River.
SleepMonsters
