Photo by Mike Bitton (via self-timer)The Red Cliffs Lodge sits on the banks of the Colorado River northeast of Moab, Utah. Several movies have been filmed here because of the dramatic red sandstone formations that shoot straight up from the valley floor.I have arrived! The Red Cliffs Lodge near Moab, Utah, will serve as headquarters for the 2006 running of the Primal Quest Expedition. Widely regarded as the toughest adventure race in the world, Primal Quest Utah will take co-ed teams of four through 500 miles of the wildest terrain the region has to offer. Fast teams may be done in as few as five to seven days. Those hoping "just to finish" will have 10 days to officially cross the finish line.
The overnight drive from Portland was as smooth as can be. I left my house at 2 p.m. Sunday, and arrived in Moab at 7 a.m. Monday. Accounting for the time change from Pacific to Mountain, I was in my trusty red Jeep for 16 hours.
Since part of my job here at Primal Quest will be to escort credentialed media around the course, my first order of business in Moab was to buy the tools and materials to recharge the Jeep's air conditioning. The fact that the AC blew ambient wasn't an issue in Portalnd, where ambient has been 50 degrees, rain or shine, for months. Here in Moab, the high is expected to be in the triple digits today, and tomorrow, and to stay that way until September! The auto parts store was open early, so I got the goods and recharged the AC. The air now blows so cold I can only stand having it on low. Lucky credentialed media!
Next I drove the 20 minutes along the Colorado River to Red Cliffs Lodge. This setting is unbelievably beautiful! The red cliffs shoot straight up from the Colorado River. It reminds me of the time I went backpacking in the Four Corners area with my friends Jud Clark and Dan Miller. We explored the Grand Gulch Plateau, especially Fish and Owl Creek. There is a serenity here that I don't feel other places. I bet I'll come to rely on that peace when things start to get a little hectic here in coming days.
Photos by Mike BittonThese two photos are of Seattle-based adventure racing team Mergeo.com. The rainy one was in the morning. The sunny one was in the afternoon.On Sunday, June 4, I covered my third annual Wicked Urban adventure race in Portland, Ore. The weather was just as zany as can be expected for springtime around here. We had rain, then bright sun, then torrential rain, then sun and wind, then more rain, then hot sun, then more rain, and the day ended with sun! It seemed like every 30 minutes, the sky simply changed its mind.
It's rare that real news comes out of an adventure race, but we had some today. During the in-line skate portion of the race, a freight train was blocking the route of Seattle-based team Mergeo.com. Mergeo waited 20 minutes for the train to move, then got impatient and climbed the stairs at the end of one of the cars to bypass the train and keep racing. A police officer was on the other side and detained the team. Arrest was considered, as were citations. In the end, the officer let the team go on its way.
I've been chipping away at a Mergeo team profile for a couple of weeks now. Today's incident will add a little color to the piece!
Photo by Mike BittonA paddle team makes its way through the rapids of Carter Falls on the Upper Clackamas River near Estacada, Ore., during the Upper Clackamas Whitewater Festival on Sunday, May 21, 2006.For the second year in a row, I photographed the Upper Clackamas Whitewater Festival for Next Adventure, Portland's Alternative Sporting Goods Store. The event is at Carter Falls near the town of Estacada, Ore. I missed the first day of events because I was in Cle Elum, Wash., photographing the TRIOBA sprint adventure race. Last year, day two of this whitewater event produced the best photos anyway. Day two features boater-X, where paddlers in whitewater kayaks jockey for position as they make their way downriver. It also features paddle teams, which pack inflatable rafts with padders who try to make it through a series of gates as fast as they can. I always feel energized after spending a day on the banks of a river.
Photo by Mike BittonAn athlete punches checkpoint 4 during the TRIOBA Sprint adventure race Saturday, May 20, 2006, near Cle Elum, Wash.
Rain raked athletes at the start of the TRIOBA sprint adventure race near Cle Elum, Wash. Just a few hours later, sun scorched participants as they crossed the finish line. Ahh, springtime in the Cascades!
Normally dominant team DART was third overall, and nearly 42 minutes behind the first finishers, the 2-man team of Montrail Northwest. Second went to the 4-man team MPGear.com-Xnutz, which was only a few minutes back from the winners.
Because DART was the first co-ed team of four to cross the finish line, they lead the 2006 TRIOBA adventure race series in the points standings (only co-ed teams of four are elegible to earn points). Being on top is not new for the Seattle-area team, which has won the title of Pacific Northwest Adventure Racing Champions (just the TRIOBA sereis, really) for the past three seasons straight.
Second place in the 4-person co-ed division went to Mergeo.com, another Seattle team, and DART's most serious competition. Mergeo actually beat DART at the final TRIOBA of 2005, where just two minutes separated the teams at the finish line.
Rosters have shuffled a bit in the off-season. DART lured Aaron Rinn away from Mergeo. To shore up its ranks, Mergeo recruited the two-person co-ed team Rubber Chickens, which is far more serious than it sounds. The Chickens are Georgia Daniels and Mike Miller, known throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond as expert trail runners whose specialty is endurance. I think any team whose members can run all the trekking sections of a race puts DART dangerously close to defeat. In years past, DART could easly make up time lost to bad navigation choices. This year, Mergeo will be a constant threat.
Photo by Mike BittonA team shoots through Class III whitewater on the St. Francis River in Southeast Missouri during the Mighty MO Expedition adventure race.I just got back from the Ozark Mountains of Southeast Missouri, where I covered the Mighty MO Expedition adventure race. It was fun to catch up with the teams I'd already met, and great to meet even more teams I never knew.
If you aren’t familiar with adventure races, they are multi-sport endurance events. In most adventure races, athletes will at the very least hike/trek/run, mountain bike and paddle either whitewater or flat water. Race directors add to or subtract from these core disciplines depending on the available terrain. One thing that is nearly universal in adventure racing is that the course is not marked. Athletes must find their way through the course, hitting every checkpoint in order, to avoid a time penalty.
In Missouri, I was on assignment for Checkpoint Zero. That’s a website that covers adventure racing (www.checkpointzero.com). If you visit the site and click on the “Features” link at the top of the page, you’ll be taken to a page showing the biggest adventure races in the world. If you click on the Mighty MO Expedition adventure race logo, you’ll be taken to the coverage I provided of the event. I wrote several journalism-style news stories during the race, as well as magazine-style features profiling three of the participating teams in the weeks leading up to the event.
My next assignment for Checkpoint Zero is the TRIOBA sprint adventure race in Ellensburg, Wash., coming up May 20. Other Checkpoint Zero assignments will follow, including the Wicked Urban adventure race in Portland, Ore., on June 4, and the TRIOBA 12-hour adventure race July 15.
In August, I will cover the Adventure Racing World Championships for Checkpoint Zero. Lucky for me, school is out for the summer at that time, so I am available! I’ve heard teams will cross into the Arctic Circle. I’ve never been to Europe, and I’ve never been to the Arctic Circle, so this will be the trip of a lifetime for me!
My dream in high school and college was to be a writer. A little research taught me that daily newspapers hired reporters, some of whom grew into amazing writers. Get paid to write full-time, straight out of college? What a plan! While at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, I had to take a photojournalism class as part of my journalism program. I found I had a knack for the work, and focused my major on photojournalism. Internshihps and full-time jobs added up to 10 years in the daily news business. I grew disenchanted with the negativity of the industry. I'd won some awards for my writing and photography, but looking around the newsroom, I saw no one I wanted to be in 10 or 20 years. I switched briefly to public relations before abandoning my writing dreams alltogether and became an elementary school teacher. A few years into teaching, my sedentary lifestyle was taking a toll. I bought a mountain bike for my birthday, and started to volunteer at endurance races. I even snapped a few photos at the events. The more races I went to, the more impatient I grew with the lousy stories coming out of these truly remarkable events. The writer in me, long burned out, still wasn't ready to take on the poor prose problem of endurance sports. That has recently changed. I've been writing my guts out for Gordon Wright, media director of the Primal Quest expedition adventure race, churning out team profiles with which he is very well pleased. I've been writing even more for Paul "Yak" Angell, founder of Checkpoint Zero, the website that in my opintion covers adventure racing better than any media outlet in the world. I've aligned myself with Checkpoint Zero because I believe it is the future of endurance sports media. But I'm working five and six hours every night because I love Yak, and I love the athletess he's letting me profile for his website. For the past two years, I've been known mostly as an adventure sports photographer. Please add writer. There's a whole other side of me that you're all going to see with great frequency in 2006.
Photo by Mike Bitton
This is a shot of my Jeep Grand Cherokee Limited in the driveway of my Vancouver, Wash., USA, home.While on spring break in Idaho, I picked up a replacement SUV for the 1994 Ford Explorer I smashed up on my way home from a fine day of snowboarding at Timberline on Mt. Hood. I moped around for a week when I learned my insurance company decided to "total" the car, even though the damage could be fixed for less than $4,000.
Had I known I'd get so lucky on the Explorer's replacement, I wouldn't have been sad at all. What you see above is my new Jeep Grand Cherokee Limited. It's a 1995 and has a LOT of miles on it. But the body and interior are in great shape, so if the day comes that it needs a new transmission or engine, I'll gladly make the upgrades. This platform is exactly what I need to chase my adventure sports assignments all around North America.
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