Krista Greisacker Memorial AR
REV3/MK
John Courain & Aaron Courain
There’s nothing quite
like waking up at 4:15 in the morning inside your minivan to suit up for an
Adventure Race. This weekend my brothers
Dodge Caravan brought us to Kempton PA for the Krista Griesacker Memorial
Adventure Race. This race would take us through a 50 mile course with 12 hours
on the clock.
The race started with a prologue designed to spread out the
field so as to not bottleneck the start. The race directors sent one of the
team’s members up a trail to get the racing passport while the others gathered
the mountain bikes together to get ready for the first leg of the race, an epic
mountain bike course through the coal country of PA. If you've ridden mountain
bikes in this area you know that this is some of the best and techiest riding
in the mid-eastern US.
Being no Slouch on foot Aaron quickly snagged our passport
and we made our way through town to the start of the MTB course. A winding, fast, and tight course that was
pre-marked. The course spun us in circles for 90 minutes as we moved toward our
first CP. At the end of the course we climbed our way on to an amazing
ridge line, through a pitch pine forest and up to the cell tower to CP1.
From CP1 teams could chose to either make their way on the
high ridge line trail to CP2 or double back through town and find their way onto
a valley road. Although the road was
definitely more mileage we thought it would be a good chance to really open up on
the cranks. We chose speed over the direct route and it ended up paying off. We
made it to CP2, a small culvert which was guarded by a couple of foxes, punched
our ticked and headed to our first TA.
This next section held in store two ‘O’ Courses, both high
on hill tops on either side of the TA down in the valley between. Teams would have to bag one side, check in,
and then bag the other. We opted to start with the slightly shorter ‘B’
course. This ended up being the popular
decision because of time constraints. Moving counter clockwise along the top of
the plateau, we bagged all the points with relative ease, aside from taking a
few minutes to navigate a rhododendron maze that held an OP inside it. The ‘B’
course had lots of steep ups and downs throughout but also some really fun
terrain and some really cool lost trails that brought you around. Once we
finished our loop we made our way down a steep reentrant and really got bummed
out when we found ourselves crawling through a complete mess of slick rocks and
dense undergrowth. After what felt like
an eternity we made our way back to the TA and quickly went after the ‘A’
Course.
The ‘A’ Course definitely had more distance involved and
some really daunting climbs and descents but we really had the most fun on this
course. The highlight was finding a strange, forgotten old road that cut
through the trees and brought us straight out to the furthest out OP at the
base of a cliff. Always a treat to find
these hidden routes through the forested areas of races. We made our way back
down to the TA, Hopped back on our bikes and made the short journey to the
paddle put in.
Our canoe made the hour float down the river finding most of
the high water but still coming up short on some of the rapids. After a handful times wet-footing it through
the shallows we finally got to the take out and began the final leg of our
journey.
The last leg was a
trek up and over a final big ridge. 3
OP’s were hidden on the northern side before the big climb up and over. F2 was
a quick trip up a reentrant right off the road from the paddle. F3 was on the
corner of a vegetation boundary in a large mowed field. Lots of teams seemed to have taken the road
over to the field but we stuck to bushwhacking and got lucky on a pretty direct
line. The last OP, F1, was a miserable
whack through a super thick hedge, changing from trees to brambles to
rhododendrons. We moved directly down a
Property boundary line and after what felt like an eternity we found the flag.
After grabbing it we decided to whack our way to the top via bushwhack instead
of making our way back to a trail that was on the map near F3 (which evidently
didn't exist in the end anyway). At the top of this final climb was the AT and
if you’ve ever done a race in the northeast you know that there is NO travel on
the AT. We found CP 9 on the far side of
the ridge overlooking the finish somewhere down in the valley. Our final descent was in front of us so we
found the shallowest descent of the ridge that we could and made our way to
another old forgotten double track trail. We grabbed CP 10 on the way down the
trail and ran it out to the road where CP 11 was. From here we made a final
road push of about 4k or so to the finish line.
And what was at the finish line? An obstacle course….
Hooray! We had plenty of time to do this without injuring ourselves so we went
ahead and finished strong, our friends from NYARA cheering us on as we lept
over puddles, climbed ropes, and crawled through tunnels.
We Managed to get out front and stay out front for the
duration of the race. No Easy task with the likes of GOALS, NYARA, and TOG on
your heels. We ended up taking the overall win and can write another great race
from 2014 into the books.
