Yuki Bar 24 Hour AR

This past weekend Marsha Hamilton & Stephanie Briggs attacked the Yuki-Bar race, put on by the Bushwack folks in the Pilot Mountain/Hanging Rock state park area of NC.

The race started Friday night at 7pm & I'd never done a 24 hour race w/ a nighttime start. Basically, it meant that you had to scramble more to get your gear together quicker, but we didn't have to find a place to sleep on Friday night . Sweet!

We began with a short trekking section, and deciding to be conservative, we skipped 2 points right away that were about a 1000 vertical feet up. That seemed like a lot of climbing from the get-go. Instead, we hit the ropes course first, which was pretty fun, though the checkerboard-plank crossing 40-feet in the air was a bit nerve wracking! CP 5 had the wrong coordinates, & it seemed that CP 4 was also not perfectly located. We decided to plot the next bike points while it was still light out on the trek course. At around 9 we headed out for Moores Spring.

I made one nav mistake here, and we missed a turn, but there was an alternative cut-through that worked fine, though it included a super-steep hill. We were one of the first teams to get to the single-track section. It was pretty fun in places, though some of the rock gardens were above our skill-level. Following the GPS trail map was challenging in some places, but we got all the points, though one that was probably misplaced took some extra time.

After leaving the trails, we started a road bike-a-thon. I'd hoped that we'd be able to shorten biking, but basically the route meant unless you wanted to skip the paddle (or the only single-track), you had to ride 60+ miles. And there was nothing flat. Not even a little bit. My quads were killing me and it was only 2am. Around that time we were startled to be approached by a pedestrian asking "What is good?". My pulse quickened, but then his staggering in the road & the wafts of pot coming from him indicated he was harmless, so we headed on our way. We had a good time picking up some of these CPs-- the waterwheel was cool.

We finally arrived at TA2 at 5am. I think we were the fourth or fifth team to get there and realize that it probably wasn't a good idea to try for the Yadkin river crossing. I was really tempted by the 200 points, but we were freezing & did not want to risk busting our butts only to not make it in time. I also had memories from the NGAR creek-crossing disaster that I didn't want to repeat.

Knowing that we could get the section 4 bike/trek CPs off the boat, I made a mistake of deciding to wait till getting to Rockford to plot the rest of our CPs. I was cold & hungry & tired, but that meant that several easy CPs got left behind. So we headed on the last biking to get to Rockford. There we plotted, (and realized that we'd been right on top of other CPs at TA2) & gobbled awesome country ham biscuits. We hit the water right after a coed 4 person team, and they were the only team we saw the whole paddle.


The paddle was uneventful, but just fast & rocky enough near the section 4 CPs to scare us out of stopping to get several checkpoints. We left probably 100+ points behind there. We got to enjoy the sight of a Bald eagle or two on the way to the take-out. We paused in the picnic shelter to do some route-planning, gobble some food & steel ourselves for more time on the frickin bikes.

We biked up & down, up & down, getting passed by a few teams on the way to Pilot Mountain. There we made a brief pit-stop to pick up the easiest CP (read lowest in elevation) & chatted with a friendly, chubby cub scout on the way back to the bike drop. Dan & Patrick tried to convince us to pick up some more CPs, since we had some time, but I was dreading the final bike & just wanted to get it over with. Too bad, because the trails & scenery would have probably been awesome. We finished with just shy of an hour and a half to spare & super hungry.
Finally, big thanks to Marsha for trying her first 24 hour race with me and doing such a kick-ass job of it! I'm still getting used to this overnight racing thing, but so far I like it! I think we rode 77 miles, paddled 18, but did only a few miles on foot.

Highlights: Three words: Country. Ham. Biscuit; the Friday-night start; Camp Hanes was a great location for a race; the ropes was a blast; all the race organizers & volunteers did an amazing job-- friendly & organized, the idea of crossing the river seemed cool, except for how cold it was;

We could live without: all the road biking (especially at the expense of the park trails that would have been more fun, but doing it all wasn't an option for slowpokes like us), some of the photo points in the dark were a little pointless, a big 'suck it' goes out to all the loose dogs that forced us into semi-sprints