TransRockies Day 2

Day 2 started out fantastic – we were able to ride for over two hours without having to get off our bikes and the climbing was somewhat gradual. Like all good things, it came to an end and we hit a 3K hike-a-bike along a steep, grassy road. The road dead ended at a scree chute and we were told the day before we'd have to climb up the chute and then pick up a singletrack trail. The scree slope was nearly vertical, so the only option was to carry your bike on your back. So we all slowly plodded along, taking one step at a time, slowly making progress. As I rounded a bend, I thought “You've got to be kidding me!” as I saw the long string of racers all up the mountain.



The terrain was tenuous, and every so often someone from above would yell “ROCK!!” and we hoped that nothing boulder sized would come down on us. We kept going, and I pulled slightly ahead and stopped at about 7000' feet in elevation – still 500' from the summit – then the unthinkable happened...people started coming BACK DOWN! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! Then we start to hear, in a message passed down from above, “Anybody seen any orange tape lately??” For a brief moment, curse words were uttered in every language represented in the race. We had gone too high...750 vertical feet to be exact, with our bikes on our backs, and at a snails pace. So we all headed back down, those already at the top chose to just bushwhack to catch the trail. As we descended down the scree slope, we saw the faint trail where we were supposed to turn, which was the largest cluster I'd ever seen. There were three “lanes” of racers all funneling into a 8” wide trail that was pretty much all hike-a-bike due to the log jam of racers. We actually had to stand there for 5-10 minutes and wait for our turn to go in. I cannot imagine how much time we lost, as the faster racers got screwed the most, and the slower ones got to benefit from our mistake. The next hour was a hurry-up-and-wait situation, as we slowly funneled through the tight singletrack.



When we finally popped out on the road and reached a control station, we were told another women's team had come through. They had gotten ahead of us while we were going up the mountain, so now we had to work a bit on the next big climb in hopes of catching them. Thankfully, we caught them halfway up the climb and were able to pass them and keep our momentum. We had some sloppy downhill hike-a-bike and then a nice gravel road cruise into the finish. We ended up putting 18 minutes on second place in about 20K, but in the end they decided not to count the stage in the GC, since things had gone so horribly wrong.

Today is a short stage, so hopefully we can get a few more minutes on them.