3/28
Today was the big day! There had been much anxiety, stress, and doubt leading up to the race (Grand Traverse, aka GT) due to the low snow year and unprecedented hot March. Would the race even happen? If it did happen, would there be snow to ski on?
All these emotions heightened by the fact that the race had been cancelled the previous year due to warm temperatures. Again, I had worked really hard to get in shape for the race, and it would be absolutely crushing for it to be cancelled again. I didn't know if I could do another year if this got cancelled. The whole month of March was mentally challenging as after a very early March storm, a ridge of high pressure (ridge of doom) sat over the Southwest. Not only did it not bring snow, but it brought record high temperatures each day. And not just by a degree or 2, but by up to 12 degrees! It was absolutely crazy. It wasn't even freezing hard at night. We could watch the snow level drop before our very own eyes. I could hardly bare to look outside. I was starting to taper the last 2 weeks, but for my small training runs, I was going at night as I couldn't stand to see the snow melting so quick. Since December 1st, my training had included 309.5 hours = 647.6 miles of ski touring, 103.6 hours = 311.9 miles of cross-country skiing, 8.4 hours = 64.7 miles of skate skiing, 7.3 hours = 53.5 miles of running for a total of 428.8 hours and 1077.7 miles. This also included 268,449 feet of elevation gain during the training.
We were getting various opinions from people as the field teams went out the week before the race. The snow wouldn't support skiers if we didn't get a freeze. Conditions would be unsafe, etc. Avalanche danger was high when it was so hot (wet slab). But others who figured it would go. And the snow on the course was melting fast. First they moved the race start from Crested Butte Mountain Resort to the High School as the snow bridges crossing the east river had collapsed. Then it was going to be 3 miles running on dirt (no snow), then 6 miles, then 8 miles, then 10. First the creek crossings were going to be snowless, but the water now high enough to go over your boots, then calf deep, then knee deep.
There was all sorts of stress. You could see the racers on social media were nervous or even giving up on it happening all together. Zach met one of the directors of safety for the race at the post office in the morning, and he was stressed. Zach helped to walk him back from "the cliff" of no race.
So in the morning I skied out from Gothic to Crested Butte for the pre-race gear check. You have to carry all sorts of safety gear (avalanche probe, beacon, shovel, bivy, stove and fuel, puffy pants and jacket, repair kid, 3L of water, 3000 calories of food, extra skins, 2 headlamps, first aid kit, etc.) since it's a self-supported race over the Elk Range at high elevation that can be frigid, blizzardy, etc and is minimally marked, so you must navigate on your own.
We got our gear checked by Emma. Cam Smith was in front of us in the gear check line, and Zach started his trash talking "This will be the only time we're behind you". For those that don't know, Cam Smith qualified for the Olympics this year in skimo (ski mountaineering) and ended up finishing just off the podium in 4th place in one of his races. He also regularly wins the GT and owns the course record.
After gear check in, it was a buffet lunch and then the race meeting and preliminary race call. The call was "we're going to Aspen". This was exciting, but keep in mind that they said that last year, only to cancel the race 2 hours before it started. We learned at the meeting that we would have 12 miles of snowless trail before we reached the snow and 3 fairly deep stream crossings that would certainly be over ski boots.
After the meeting, we did some last minute prep of gear, and I went to the hostel to try to nap (the race starts at midnight), but was unsuccessful out of nerves and a spinning mind.
For those who aren't familiar, the GT is a grueling, self-supported 40 mile point to point ski mountaineering race going over 2 high passes (above 12,000ft) and with 20 miles raced above 11,000 feet in the Elk Mountains to reach Aspen from Crested Butte. It gains nearly 7,000 feet of elevation. For safety, it's a partner race where we must carry survival gear including a bivy, stove, sleeping pads, extra down, avalanche rescue gear, etc. Last year my partner was to be my friend and former Gothic winter caretaker Jack Snow (team Snow Guys), but this year I had stepped it up and had my brother (team Guy bro-skis). We have been on many adventures together in our life, and this certainly would be another one.
If you want to read more about the race, here is a good article about it: https://us.montane.com/blogs/news/the-grand-traverse-a-wild-endurance-race-in-the-rockies?srsltid=AfmBOoo8X1wDEMdyspPnXokHMFSGE46ZFkBGNSPdDb6-5sX-009e0R8-
11pm came and went and still no news that they were canceling the race. So we gathered up our packs, lashed our skis and boots to our packs, and headed to the start line at the high school. Looking around the high school cafeteria, I figured I was very outclassed. Everyone had fancy skimo gear. Spandex suits, special helmets and glasses, super lightweight boots, etc. I was thinking, maybe we could finish in the top 50. Originally, when I first signed up for the GT with Jack, I just wanted to finish. There are 2 timed cut-off locations, where if you are too slow they turn your around back to Crested Butte. Last year I had been stressed about making the cut off times. This year, when I asked Zach, he had said he would do it, but he wanted to try to finish in the top 10. I said, okay, but I was highly doubtful. After training hard, I was thinking it might be possible to finish in the top 20, but now looking at all these folks in their fancy gear and me in my heavier (and often janky) backcountry gear, I figured we didn't have much chance. I was actually skiing in my heavy touring boots, though my boss did lend me an ancient pair of lightweight skimo skis.
At 11:45 we headed out for the beacon check, then the free-heeler blessing. It was a horde of people with their skis and boots on their packs. Someone said that watching the start reminded them of a horde of orks going to battle. Bro positioned us up near the front. He hadn't been running at all, I me just a little bit, so the plan was to jog the beginning (through the end of the snow storage area to the start of the deli trail) and then fast walk the next 11 miles to the snow.
After the start of the run, we were doing pretty well, maybe in 4th place, and we could see Cam just about 100m ahead of us. This continued for the first 3 miles. I was thinking that we must be doing something wrong, going out too hard and that we'd blow up later. I've never done a long endurance race before, so I knew little of pacing. But being close to Cam, I could tell Bro was getting "yellow jersey fever" and that it was going to be a long night of racing, meaning we were going to actually race.
Here's what I wrote my boss after the race:
"It ended up being such a crazy and memorable event. So many times through the night I was thinking this is just so crazy. Zach, who hates running, had said, "let's jog the first 1/4 mile until the deli trail and then let's fast walk the rest of the way." Well when we got into the pinch point of the deli trail we kind of had to keep running. Then when we got to the paved road, we could see Cam, and Zach was like, there's a pickleball court up here, we need to catch Cam so I can trash talk (Zach bested him in some pickleball tournament a few years ago). So we hustled to catch him, and it's feeling surreal bc we're chatting with and trash talking a bit with this Olympian. And we're looking at his tiny pack and wondering, where the heck does he even have ski boots in there. At mile 4 or so, they have to stop to pee, so now we're in the lead. And I could tell Zach was getting yellow jersey fever, so I knew I was in for a long night. And I was also thinking, we're doing something terribly wrong. Like why are we running with the lead 4 teams? We're totally going to blow up. Eventually Cam passed us when we tried to eat some stuff and slowed down, but we passed them again at mile 12 right before the last river crossing. We had the lead for 5 or so minutes, and it was just the craziest thing. Last year I remember being stressed about making the cutoff times, and now here we were. We were then into that sorta wild skin track going up and over logs and following a fresh mountain lion track for a couple of miles (prints looked like they were put in during the heat of the day that afternoon). Then we arrived to you [my boss Steve] at friends hut and it seemed so early. At that point I was still thinking that I had no idea how to ski anything past 20 miles, and let's just see if we can make it up Star Pass. Zach started getting bad stomach issues and slowed down a lot, but I was able to coax him up with the thought of Jake at the top. He seemed to recover on the descent, but did have stomach issues most of the race. When we got to Star and saw no other lights below, I started to believe that maybe, just maybe we could finish top 10, guessing people would still catch us. We also started to laugh thinking about what our friends would be waking up to with the live tracker. It's 5 am, mom and Elisha are up, it's 5:30, Sophia is up, etc. We felt great between star and Taylor. We definitely regretted not skating Taylor flats. I had no idea what the course was like up there. Zach bikes up there a lot and considered sking, but we didn't. At the very end we saw Cam and Logan's skate tracks, and we were like dang. It was such slow skinning as the snow was like velcro. When we got to Taylor pass, we were losing a little spirit. Two teams were catching us (father-daughter and the Aspen team). We had 5 minutes on them at the pass, but by the 2nd big hill on Richmond ridge it was down to 2 minutes ahead of the Aspen group. We were just following the route but I think they were picking better lines (they had done the race 15 times and said they knew every rock and stump on the Aspen side). At the last water station (Opus Hut?) Zach stopped for water and a chat with someone there. I think he didn't know they were right behind us. Right as we were about to leave they passed us. Now in my mind we needed to just keep strong enough to keep 3rd. I figured these guys had caught us and passed, so they were more fit. Zach said to just keep pressure on them in case they made a mistake. But on the next climb we caught them. We then went back and forth with them for several miles and even chatted with them. We'd beat them going up, then they'd catch us on the transitions and pass us. But Zach enjoyed being behind them on the downs as they picked better "local" lines as the Richmond trail/cat track was a frozen nightmare. We were going back and forth a lot, and I was thinking in my head, "man the Guy bros are really in a dog fight." During the whole of Richmond Ridge we (or at least I) didn't eat or drink because to do so would cost time. We eventually got to a point where they weren't passing us on the transitions and then there was a long skate where we put a lot of time on them, and I was starting to feel really good about beating them. Neither of us knew how long it was until Richmond ended, but unfortunately we had saved too much in the tank when we saw the lifts. We could have pushed it harder the last mile and really put time in them.
We made several mistakes at the end that cost us. At the end, Richmond Ridge did some S curves that we followed, but then we saw you could have just gone straight (10-15 secs there). When we got to the resort there were 2 patrollers that happened to be just getting off the lift. We figured they had to check our leash system. So we called over to them and asked them to check, but they didn't know anything about it. We hooked on our leashes, but I was using Paracord and one of my loops had been cut off on the ice, so we had to re-tie. Turns out there was no check for leashes and the team that got 2nd still had their leashes duct taped to their skis when they finished, so they didn't even stop for that. That was another 30-60 secs for us. We looked back, didn't see them, so we said, "we're good skiers, the only way we screw this up is we crash or go off course". So we said let's ski conservatively. The top flats are a bit confusing of where to go, so we weren't just pointing and going down we were making turns and figuring it out. When we got to the narrow gulch we ran into 4 snowcats grooming. It was sketchy but we managed to pass them, but we slowed a ton. We looked back and still didn't see them. I was starting to get tears welling up in my eyes due to the emotion of how well we were doing/had one. We got by the cats and to Kleenex corner. There was a groomed run to the right Zach started to go down and I yelled hard at him not to. When I've skied Aspen before that was always roped off and I figured it wasn't roped at the moment as the mtn wasn't open yet and the cats were going that way. So Zach had to side step up and I stopped. Being below the cats and the fresh groom, the slopes were terribly icy, so at Kleenex corner we went really wide into the east facing sun slope to hopefully find softer snow. When we did that I heard a loud noise and saw the other team straight lining it down the ice at a speed I would have been uncomfortable with in skimo skis. So they passed us at that dirt spot you can see in the video of Benn and Tyler (200 or so yards from the finish)
It was a bit disheartening to have it happen at the end, but we were still pretty stoked. If I could relive the last 15 minutes I would have pushed the last 10 minutes of Richmond hard as we were feeling good being in the heat of a race and they were faltering. And then I would have pushed it on the downhill instead of enjoying the groomer with wide turns like we did. But it's all good in the end! The team that got us at the end said they took a different, more direct route down the mtn, some steep icy black that allowed them to get us in their sights and then they had the ability to chase us. The guys that beat us were nice and pointed to our boots and said if we had gear like theirs, (they're also sponsored professionals) it wouldn't have been close, haha
But wow, what a crazy event. And nothing I expected to happen at all. I almost still can't believe it. Not in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that"
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