2014 Krista Greisacker Memorial AR

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.