Adventure Beat

 

Throughout the third and fourth days of racing, the world's longest, largest, and most difficult adventure race challenged the competitors with a seemingly endless slog of canyoneering and river paddling. The leaders have been going days and nights without sleep — leading to mental errors that could decide the race.  Utah's famous slot canyons present tough technical challenges, while the kayak sections demand pure paddling endurance. Primal Quest's Gordon Wright brings us this from the field.

Team Merrill/Wigwam leads Primal Quest Utah, but by the time you read this, there could be a different squad atop the leaderboard.

In a competition marked by high temperatures, the battle for adventure racing's largest prize purse of $250,000 is similarly hot.  Five teams have been running neck-and-neck throughout the three days of competition.  Going into Monday night's dark zone, Nike/PowerBlast had a solid lead that translated into several solid hours of sleep at the transition from mountain biking to riverboarding, and sleep is as precious an asset as speed in this chess match of an expedition. But leads are as ephemeral as the virga that drifts across the horizon in the endless desert course.

Coming off two paddling sections of the Green River that totaled 80 miles, the other teams bunched at the front of the pack are Merrill/Wigwam, Spyder, GoLite/Timberland and SOLE.

The teams then faced what is considered the crux of the race: a 29-mile canyoneering leg into, along, and out of the notorious and aptly-named Hell Roaring Canyon. The canyon is utterly desolate, completely exposed and replete with loose rock. During the leg, the teams faced a pucker-inducing 400-foot, free-hanging rappel, as well as other, shorter ropes sections.

The canyoneering is so tight in spots that satellite uplinks from the competitors' GPS units were sketchy, and water was at an absolute premium.

Emerging from Hell Roaring Canyon first was Merrill/Wigwam, who seem to have struck a careful balance between peak performance and physical and mental exhaustion.

But the effects of the desert sun may have finally gotten the best of some teams, including those at the front of the pack.

As temperatures at the base of Hell Roaring Canyon surpassed 100 degrees, Nike/PowerBlast, arguably the best group of adventure racers on the planet, made a dreadful discovery: They had left their trail running shoes and socks at the previous checkpoint, nearly 45 miles upstream.

Nike could not afford to backtrack and was forced to forge ahead for nearly 30 miles wearing only mesh water shoes that provide little protection or support.

As the television crew prepared to film a segment illustrating how inadequate the water shoes were for the task, ABC commentator and current racing star Isaac Wilson reached into one of the many kayaks resting on the sand to retrieve a sample pair. With his hand in the cockpit of one of Team SOLE's kayaks, he found a pair of ascenders, a mandatory piece of equipment used to by teams to scale the ropes section deep within the canyons ahead. Clearly, Nike was not the only team hurt by fatigue.

One team that is making a move up the leaderboard is Team Salomon/Crested Butte. They came off the water looking like the most relaxed and least stressed team so far.

"We've slept every night. We've been racing conservatively until we get out of the desert," said Team Salomon/Crested Butte racer Jon Brown. "We're not really familiar with it. We didn't train for it, but as an adventure racer you just know how to suffer."

Brown's teammate, the ebullient Jari Kirkland, was more definitive: "We feel we have the speed to keep up with the top five teams, but we're not... yet. We'll try to move to the top ten in the LaSal Mountains."

With leading teams running on nearly no sleep, mistakes may ultimately redefine the leaderboard and the outcome of this year's Primal Quest.

Stay with Adventure Beat for the latest from somewhere in Utah's desert stretches.