red is bike, green is on foot, blue is paddling
This year I agreed to do the Teton Ogre 24 hour adventure race in Driggs, Id - to the west of the Teton Range. I planned to drive up there, not realizing that Russia would invade Ukraine and almost double the cost of gas. Oops. Compared to Expedition Oregon the planning was a whole lot easier. Food for 24 hours - how much planning can that take? I probably didn't need extra batteries, and so on. Still, I needed the gear and I had to get myself and said gear up to Idaho in time to pick up Andy and his bike at the airport at noon. I left in the morning the day before heading east and then north. I forgot about the time change, so ended up wanting to get a bit closer the first day, and then I didn't see a good place to sleep so day 1 was a long long day. That meant day 2 was pretty short and I had time to stop at a park to eat breakfast and stretch in the shade.
When I picked up Andy we were able to slide his bike box in on top of all my stuff in the back of the truck. Then we made a stop at a grocery store and drove on to Driggs. The views of the Tetons coming in towards town were pretty nice and everything was a lot greener than what I was used to. We went to the park and spent some time relaxing and sorting gear. Much later Jameson and Kellee showed up and then we went for a pizza dinner and drove east out of town to camp. The campground was expensive and full, but we found some flat national forest land off the road and set up there. We went to bed pretty early and it was good to get a full night of sleep - at semi-altitude - in preparation for the race.
June 25, 2022 We slept in for a bit, then headed down to the park where the race would start/stop. There we set up our bikes and got all our gear ready to go - packing our bin and our paddling bag. Then we turned in our waivers and bins and picked up the map - one big map. Once we had the map we started plotting where we would go and how we would get there. We waffled back and forth about if we would just wear bike shorts for the entire race or swap out for the hiking and boating. I think we decided we would just wear them the whole time.
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At 1:30 they gave us a bunch of last minute instructions and at about 2 we bicycled out of town to where the actual racing would start (they cleverly didn't have 100 racers racing through town at the same time). Once we were out of town there was a countdown and we were off. Some teams cleverly had moved over to the bike path, but we were on the dirt road - since this was a little shorter with a right turn we were in the lead for most of the way down to the end of the road. There we started walking our bikes along a fence before wading around the end of it and bikewhacking across the meadow to CP1 on a little tree. Then we had to wade across the Teton R. and shortly after that a rather muddy slough. This was tricky walking as the bottom was a little clingy, but I think the later teams had it a lot worse as the mud got churned deeper and deeper. After the mud we were back on a dirt road heading towards the mountains W of the valley. We took a wrong turn here but figured it out pretty soon quickly getting to the first TA where we left our bikes and headed off on foot.
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I wasn't really paying attention to the maps here, just following along - we headed up a trail that wasn't on the map and in pretty short order found a CP, we continued on bushwhacking up a steep slope to another CP. Eventually we headed off for a pro point that was quite a bit off course - unless you were going for it. At this point I think we were behind Utah Orienteering and just ahead of Team Psyched. We took pics of each other as we passed them after getting the CP. We backtracked a bit and then headed downhill towards a creek. This wasn't the recommended route (that we didn't know about), and involved some steep bushwhacking that was pretty thick at the bottom of the valley. Then some more bushwhacking up a slope. There we saw Utah and Psyched but had a hard time finding the CP - we wandered around in circles a few times not believing we were supposed to go downhill as much as we were - ultimately we found it - the direction we had been going but a few hundred feet farther - in thick trees. Then we punched it and headed downhill back to the trail through more thick bushwhacking. This probably put us nearly an hour behind the top 2 teams and we never really recovered. Getting the extra pro points and wasting time on another CP meant that we were now behind a lot of teams, so it was sort of nice to pass them on the way to the next TA and at the TA. This was to paddle down the Teton River as twilight turned to night. We put on the raingear we had before we started, but for Kellee and Jameson that meant no rain pants. As it got darker it got colder. I was mostly ok, but we stopped to put some more layers on Kellee. As soon as we stopped paddling I got cold. Once it was full dark and cold a mist started rising from the water. That meant that my headlight would just light up the mist. Fortunately a but of a breeze would clear it from time to time. I was getting quite cold when we got to the end around midnight. I was shivering at the transition but was quite glad to have dry shoes and warm drinks. Sadly there was a hole with water in it that I stumbled into when getting my bike - just one dry foot now. Despite being quite cold we had a reasonably fast transition and were off on the bikes.
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Sadly we were not going immediately uphill, but we still warmed up soon. I guess it was a gentle uphill as we moved away from the river valley, and then it was much more steeply uphill and we had to take off some layers. On the steepest uphills Andy had to go much faster than the rest of us because he had a single speed bicycle. If it was steep enough to have to walk that didn't matter, otherwise he surged ahead and then waited. Once again we overshot our turn but noticed it fairly quickly. Then we were heading up steeper trails - slowly. Finally we made it up to the next CP. There probably would be good views from here, but it was pretty dark. We were able to see 4 planets and a sickle moon though (I never got a view of Mercury, but we only had glimpses of clear sky to the east at the optimal time). There was just a hint of light in the eastern sky when we saw some headlights on a slope ahead of us - Utah Orienteering getting a CP - we had caught up with them, but we skipped a few points we planned to get on the way back when visibility was better. We continued on a little behind them getting the rest of the points up this road - and seeing Psyched at another point - they were on foot and had left their bikes far behind. Finally we got the last point out this road and headed back to get the last 2 we had skipped in the dark - sadly with a pretty big descent and return. Then it was back along the road picking up points on the way and mostly descending instead of gaining altitude.
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We slowly ticked off the checkpoints, but the clock was ticking too. We started towards the last pro point but then when it looked like a rough trail to get there decided it would take too long (looking at the tracking map we were looking at the wrong trail - oops). I still don't know if we could have made it in time to get it - and that still would have only put us in second place. So we turned around and headed back downhill and towards the end. We tried to keep a decent pace on the bikes back to the finish, but we felt like we were solidly in 3rd place and nothing we could do short of not finishing in time would change that.
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We crossed the finish line with a time of 23 hr and 11 minutes (with 49 minutes to go) and as expected a solid 3rd place in the race and in the 3-4 person co-ed category. This was out of some 33 teams, so not bad, but a bit disappointing as we weren't really contenders. Team Get Psyched did a good job and clearly won with all the checkpoints (Orienteering Utah skipped the last one like we did, although they finished hours ahead of us). Psyched did a good job with route choice including finding and hiding 'til Orienteering Utah past to use a clear path along a fenceline to bike down avoiding a fun but much slower singletrack. This is all the more impressive as their team was made up of dad and 14 and 16? year old kids - Nice work. Obviously our failure to find one chackpoint for too long hurt us - and then we were slower to get on the water so paddled longer in the dark, and being out of reach behind the lead teams took away some incentive to try to push, but I think we were just a bit too slow on the bicycles to really compete even if we didn't have the navigation trouble. It would have been more interesting to be in the mix at the front a bit longer even if the end result was the same.
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