There aren’t that many skimo races in the Pacific Northwest, in part because the sport is only beginning to take root and in part because local ski resorts (I’m looking at you Mt Bachelor) have not been welcoming of race series. Consequently, if you want to race, you get to drive. Still, after three straight weeks of full-time studying and a cabin fever mental breakdown, driving five hours from Portland for an hour of racing didn’t sound so bad to me.
Last night’s race was hosted by Free Range Equipment at the rootsy Hoodoo Ski Area as part of the Hoodoo Backcountry Fest. I’m not sure what’s backcountry about the backcountry fest, but there were tele slalom comps, fatbike races, and parking lot parties raging when I arrived. Between the beer and the bluegrass it seems like a pretty good time.
The race was the brainchild of Tosch Roy, friend and founder of Free Range Equipment. He and his indefatigable mother set a course of glowsticks through a closed area of Hoodoo under the afternoon’s rain and remained cheerful as contestants arrived. The rain, thankfully, switched to snow.
The course was a single 650-vertical-foot drag race along a flat groomer and then up a pair of steep headwalls. Following the transition came a road, a tuck and throttle dark and shadowy groomer, and a well-lit but super-icy-chunky steep face to the lap flag. The race division made four laps for 2700′ in just under four miles. One tricky race rule was the lack of a mandatory transition zone at the base, with skating permitted to the end of the flat groomer (if skating is your thing).
About twenty five folks lined up in the dark at 6 pm, with snow falling lightly. Some six speedsuits were in attendance, with gear growing in weight from there to full-size powder tele-tanks. Never having been on my current race skis, and with few days on snow for the season, I was anxious to see how things would shake out.
At the gun, the lead group went out fast, but not at the most psychotic pace I’ve seen in skimo starts. A group of five of us hit the first climb together, but two began to fall off as we hit the first headwall. I sat in with Max King and Zach Violett through a strong first climb, and clearing the transition first, took off ahead of them.
In the dark and without eyewear, I fairly immediately lost the way, and with Zach and Max back on my tails we peeled into the second lap as a group. They opted to skate to the end of the groomer, but I quit when I bogged down in the loose snow. Transitioning I ran/skinned back to them and took the lead up the second climb.
Max is a strong climber, catching and passing me near the top of the second climb. With eyewear on, the second descent went faster, and we started to build a small gap in front of Zach. Laps three and four went similarly; I rode near my aerobic peak to try to hang onto Max’s tails (and the blinking read light taunting me from the back of his headlamp) hoping that he’d drop a skin while our lead grew. Cramping up the fourth climb, I was skinning scared, but looking back from the transition had a comfortable lead in front of Zach and skied a conservative descent into the finish about 40 seconds behind Max.
I’m super happy to have had a fairly smooth race to kick off the season. I can’t say that I felt great– I haven’t done any workouts anywhere near as fast this season –but with no big hiccups I was able to use my relative strengths in skiing and transitions to make up for my distaste for groomer drag-racing on the climbs. My only technical bauble was with eyewear, a headlamp precluding goggles on the helmet, but that wouldn’t have been such an issue if it wasn’t snowing fairly hard. That aside, it’s always entertaining how a transition can really fall apart when you’re hypoxic.
It feels good to go hard against some good competition. It’s time to look ahead to the Vertfest races at Mt Bachelor and Alpental in two and three weeks’ time. Hopefully, once I’ve taken this damn boards exam in a week, I’ll be able to put in some time on snow and feel even stronger for those.
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