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.
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.
Today was the first official race of Laramie Daze - the ever popular one man (cowboy, girl, whatever) relay. We had a mass start and each were given a map case with four maps in it: Loops A, B, C, and Z. The first three loops were all very similar, but each person had them in a random order. The last loop was the same for all runners. Each time we completed a loop, we were supposed to remove the top map from the case, drop it in the box at the finish chute and proceed out on the next one.
Day 2 of Laramie Daze. I woke up around 8:30 AM at the Yellow Pine campground, grabbed a quick Pop-Tart for breakfast and headed up to the suggested training map at Medicine Bow. The training course was flagged with yellow and blue tape and split into two halves - one middle-type, 10 controls, 4.5 km and a second half with 6 controls over the same distance. I only did the first half in order to save my legs for the afternoon, and managed a respectable 7:30 pace on the relatively flat terrain, even with two mistakes. I was the only one out there - Peg, Ludwig, and Ardis (at least two of them from TSN, I don't remember exactly) showed up around the time I finished.
But here was the afternoon course. Very different.
Today was the first day of events at the 2009 Laramie Daze! After the relaxing hike up Medicine Bow Peak in the morning, I hit Laramie for lunch and wi-fi and headed up to the map called Plains of Despair for the 3-4 PM start window. Course geekery below.
The next morning, I got a 7 AM start and headed west out of the Black Hills and across the open expanses of eastern Wyoming. At Lance Creek, I headed off into a maze of gravel roads going west to hit the freeway at Douglas. All the land was still open range, with frequent cattle guards, but the view was open and much less unnerving than the confines of the Black Hills. The roads were even in pretty good shape, and I made good time to reach the freeway near Douglas. I wanted to visit an interesting spot mentioned in the gazetteer - Ayres Natural Bridge.
When you think of Wyoming, I'd bet one the the first things that comes to mind are the vast western plains, filled with vast herds of cattle. Or maybe, the attendant old-style cowboys spending all day in the saddle with nothing but a chaw of tobacco, a flask of spirits, and a pound of hardtack. Or maybe a lonely field of oil rigs surrounded by sagebrush to the horizon. Of course, there's always Yellowstone, and the Tetons too... but back in 2007, I found that Wyoming has a lot of lesser-known scenic areas. One in particular is the Snowy Range, a small, steep range about 30 miles west of Laramie in the southeastern corner of the state.
Here's a few photos from the top of the range, between 10,000 and 12,000 feet in altitude. I shot them with a old pocket digital camera, and only did some touchup work on one of them - but it doesn't matter much, since the scenery is so photogenic! Click through to see them all.
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