Pete Curtis
A software architect, endurance athlete, and musician living in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA.
This is my own humble place to share the things I enjoy.
contact (at) petestuff (dot) org
I've posted some more photos from my Colorado/Wyoming trip.
See more photos of runners from Laramie Daze.
Or more photos from Estes Park, Garden of the Gods, and Kite Lake.
So this was only our third (my second) major race this year, but it sure didn't seem like we were out of practice. We captured a solid 2nd place finish with a convincing performance in the orienteering section at the end. Even though second place really means first loser, finishing within an hour of WEDALI is a victory in many people's eyes, including ours. And we were even ahead of them for a time! But first things first.
Brian, Dave, Val, and I made up the main team, and Rick and Chris raced as GH 2. Race headquarters was at the Black Bear Casino and Hotel off I-35 and Hwy 210, so it was quite obvious we'd be using Jay Cooke for at least some of the race - and I had some ideas about other nearby areas.
The pre-race meeting was 2 PM on Friday, and afterwards we loaded our ropes bag and paddle bag into a trailer and got on the school bus for a rocky, dusty drive to the start in the middle of the Nemadji State Forest.
Last week when I was in Colorado with Roger, Jane, Ian and Lori, I thought I'd try to show everyone back at home what climbing a mountain is like. And relatively speaking, Quandary Peak in September is pretty simple, requiring nothing technical. It's only a 3.75 mile, 3300 foot climb to the summit. And then you go back down the same way.
So here's a video!
I took this with my Canon camcorder, but I'm going to look into some other, more robust options for outdoor activity, maybe some combination of GoPro for ruggedness and mounting, and Flip for resolution?
It's official - plane ticket is purchased! Annie sent me some photos today from Tantalus Drive in the hills above Honolulu.
Here's one reason.
The aspens are turning, obviously.
Success! Ian and I summitted Pikes Peak around 1:15 PM on Thursday afternoon. From Barr Camp onwards, we split up and went ahead of Roger and Jane. They arrived around 2 PM. We all rested at the summit house for a couple hours, and then took the cog railway down. I don't have any photos since I took video instead, and I'll have to wait until I get home to edit it down. As a replacement, here's the 14ers.com route map. We took the route from the east coming out of Manitou Springs, and the map only shows the last half.
It was very busy at the trailhead because the USAF Academy was doing a morning workout at the trail. I had to park way down in town and walk up to the trailhead. There's a lot of cool things along the trail, including the Incline Railway. Wait till you see the video of the cadets climbing up that!
On Wednesday we left Estes Park in the morning and arrived near Colorado Springs in mid-afternoon. We got settled in at the campground (which was nothing much to speak of, a commercial deal hemmed in by the four-lane highway) and visited Garden of the Gods in the afternoon.
The "Kissing Camels" are in the top center of this photo.
I'm a bit rushed to post a route description, so I'll just show the maps from Friday ("The Toe") and Sunday ("Happy Jam").
Notice the 11-12 leg with a ridiculous 150+ meters of climb.
Splits for both courses are posted on Attackpoint.
Skipping a day here - yesterday (Friday) we did a crazy course at the Toe, but I'll have to wait until I take a picture of the map to post it. One leg had a 160 meter climb, all at once. There was another way around, but quite a bit longer.
So anyway, here was today's "real" race course at Pelican Bay. Each day this week, more and more people have showed up. There were quite a few faces from Colorado this time, including the whole Baird family who are out visiting Graham.
And the courses keep rolling on. Today was at Bisbee Hill, and we were warned that the red course was crossing into blue territory, with a total length of 9.3 km. The area also proved to be very open running in most places, with only patches of sagebrush instead of a nearly continuous cover like yesterday.
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