MANHUNT 2010

Alarm goes off at 6:00 am Saturday morning. Shelley and I get dressed, have some breakfast and pack our camlebak's. Safety pack, first aid kit, about 5 liters of water, trail mix and protein bars, camera, Kleenex and gloves.

We are picked up at 6:45 am, jump in a pick up and taken to our starting location, 18 km (as the crow flies) from the finish line.

Job - Get to the finish line before the Mantrackers find you!

The Mantrackers are located only 1 mile to our east along a well site road. We have to wait until 8:00 am for the start of our race. We mill around, practice making some dummy tracks and covering them up. The road is hard packed and the tracks are hard to see. Advantage Prey.

At 8:00 am the signal flare goes off, the Mantrackers radio that they can see it and we are off.

We go directly into the bush. The horses will be here very quickly and we need to find cover. We find a overgrown quad trail quite early though which makes our travel quite easy. We follow this for a few kilometers, changing our direction and choosing trails that are taking us in a South-westerly direction. We have a couple clearing crossings in the first few kilometers and are very nervous about the Mantrackers coming across us in these spots.

We get into some deeper forest and lose our quad trail. Still have a pretty good game trail most of the time but still hard to slug through. Lots of dead fall from the May Long snow.

At about 6 or 7 km in we come to a well site road. It is bitter sweet. Happy to run/walk on a nice surface but very nervous about being caught. Road = horses advantage. We decide to run the road for a couple km's to make up some time and rest our legs.

The road ends in an opening so we hide a bit and sit down for our first rest. Eat, drink and plan the next move.

There was a choice between an overgrown cutline or the bush. I was nervous about the cutline and I know Shelley wanted to take it. Looking back now with the advantage of satellite mapping I can see we should have taken it and also how close we were to it! Although our slugfest through the bush and over the Saddle Hills was the hardest section, the cutline would have also been tough as it was very grown over and had alot of fallen trees. Either way we would have still been in the deepest forest possible. 20/20!

After another 6km of slugging through the bush we came to the large pipeline running though the area. We knew we would have to cross this but were quite nervous about it. Again basically because it switches the advantage back to the Mantrackers.

We don't see them and decide to travel North to the wellsite that we can see. Again we know we are on the pipeline but we aren't sure where along that pipeline we are. To far south or north and we would miss our opportunity to find a road.

At the well site we are able to find our exact location on the map using land locations. No guessing...we know exactly where we are. What a feeling!

We head West on a well site road and mainly stick to roads and cutlines for the next 9 or 10 km.

We have to run the last km across an open field to the finish line. So nervous that the Mantrackers are waiting for you but happy to be done. Everyone cheered us across the finish line and toasted us with champagne.

What an experience. 26 km across some pretty dense bush. Some areas we are sure no one has ever been! Thank you to The Evelyn Sutherland foundation and of course Shelley for being such a great partner.

Man Hunt

So last week I received a call from a friend who was hoping I would help her friend. Long story short, I was asked to become prey in a man hunt the next weekend. That would be this Saturday!
After thinking about it and confirming I could get a partner, we gave a resounding YES!
So now I am on the countdown. 4 sleeps until I run for my life from two men on horseback! Yikes

All on the bumpy road to an adventure race.