Laramie Enduro Recon Mission 1

Determined not to let a lack of course knowledge (see previous post) hurt me in the Laramie Enduro Jo and I set out on a recon mission to pre-ride the Laramie Enduro course. It was a simple idea in concept. We could just drive up there, take our time and spend the day riding the course. No problem right? I was so wrong!

The race promoters held and organized pre-ride in early June which Doug and Jo were able to go to, but I missed it because I was back East. There is a reason the promoters hosted an organized pre-ride. The 70 mile course meanders through the desolate rolling mountains East of Laramie, WY without many clear markers. Compared to Colorado's populated Front Range it is truly wild country. The course follows a maze of semi-unmarked overgrown fire roads and single track. There are some places where there is no semblance of a trail or road, just endless grasslands. Even though the course is marked during the race, people have gotten lost in previous years losing minutes to hours and race position trying to find their way. After Friday I can see why. As you'll see below the course is basically two large loops. Jo and Doug rode most of loop 2 in the pre-ride so I figured we'd focus on loop 1 first.

Here is the map available through the website:

The map is a great topo map, but it's size is so small any details are rendered useless. I tried to, no avail, to enlarge it in photoshop. Unable to zoom in on the course, it's useless for navigation.

Dismayed, I researched other options. I paid $30 to join Singletracks.com who offered a topo / GPS upload map. The Singletracks.com map was a joke. It was scaled way to large for navigation and lacked any topo detail. I want my $30 bucks back!

The race promoters offer a GPS upload for free. You can even overlay it in Goolge Maps. This seemed like the best tool to avoid getting lost so I banked using this as my main navigation tool. I would back it up with printed version of the course overlaid on a Google Maps picture with road and topo relief info.

I spent all day Thursday preparing for the trip. It's a 2 hour drive to Laramie and the cheapest and most environmentally friendly way to get there would be in the Honda which finally has a complete bike rack after finding an extender on Craigslist last week. After getting the rack dialed I cleaned and tuned both bikes and replaced Jo's 22 tooth gear with a 20. The only thing left to do was load the GPS. It was 11:00pm and we wanted to leave by 6:00am to have all day. The rack and bike tuning took longer than planned, but I could still get 6 hours of sleep with 30 min to load the route. That was until I crossed paths with this:

This 6 inch piece of plastic, wire, and rubber would undermine the entire mission. My Etrex Vista GPS uses a serial port connector to connect to the computer, while my laptop and most laptops made in the current millennium have replaced serial ports with USB ports. I bought this adapter with the GPS years ago and it has been nothing but problems. It would work for a while and then my computer would crash. Late Thursday night I backed up all my data and gave it shot. Nothing. I tried repeatedly to load the driver that would allow the cord to work, but it just wouldn't. It was incredibly frustrating. Minutes ticked into hours and my 3:00am I was defeated and went to bed thinking all of the days work was in vain. Without a map, the GPS was the only option and I couldn't connect it to the computer.

As the ceiling fan above our bed came into focus Friday morning it was illuminated with vibrant sun rays that could only mean 6:00am had come and gone. The clock would confirm it was 10:30am. We were 4.5 hours behind schedule with no way to find our way on the course. I laid in bed mentally stumbling through the morning fog that filled my brain for another option. If I couldn't load the route on my GPS there had to be another way. There was. Google Maps displays the latitude and longitude of the cursor continuously. If I followed the course with the cursor I could manually enter lat. and long. waypoints. The problem with this is that without a tracklog the GPS wouldn't be able to follow the thousands of turns in the course. It could only navigate in a straight line between waypoints. Similar to the stars of a constellation in comparison to the picture they represent. It would have to do. It took an hour of thumb numbing button pushing to create and load 30 waypoints on the loop 1. If I backed it up with my homemade topo map that would give us two layers of navigation. The course is orange and the GPS waypoints are yellow.

By noon we were on the way. The drag of two bikes plus air conditioning negated any gas mileage gains of the Honda. The M Coupe actually seems to be the most fuel efficient vehicle for road tripping with bikes. It cruises comfortably at 80mph sipping gas at only 2500rpms in 5th, while the Honda revs 5000rpms. We got to the trailhead at just after 2pm. Armed with ample water, gu's, bars, spare tubes, a multi-tool, maps, and GPS we headed out.

The course starts from the trail head into an established singletrack area called Happy Jack's. When I used to adventure race we navigated using UTM coordinates, a topo map, and a compass. I use the GPS mostly for hang gliding, only occasionally as a bike computer. At first, I didn't have the current waypoint displayed on the navigation page and didn't realize the GPS auto navigates to the nearest waypoint relative to direction. It has never been a problem with the distant waypoints used in hang gliding. After spending way to long trying to navigate us through the short maze of Happy Jack's singletrack I finally got us out of the woods to the trail head where the course departs on fireroads to the north. The odd thing was there was a Honda parked at that trail head that looked just like ours. "Wow, that Honda has the same color bike trays as ours", I thought. It was ours! I navigated us in a complete circle back to the car. With time and Jo's confidence in my skills fading we decided to bypass the short singletrack section and take the road to the fireroad!

The course opened up into high, rolling grass lands which I thought would make it easier. It wasn't. I would have been better off with a detailed topo map and compass. There were so many "ghost roads" and spur intersections that each turn in the course took 2o minutes of riding in circles to find the correct route. It was frustrating, time consuming, and may not have been graceful, but I did manage to keep us on course.

The scenery was beautiful, more like late spring than summer at our 8000 foot elevation. Temperatures were mild, the grass was still a rich green and the wild flowers were in full bloom. We were completely alone on the land, treated to a horizon mostly void of man made influence. The quiet was only disturbed by the wind, insects, and occasional distant cry of a hawk or eagle. It was a perfect escape from the hordes of 4th of July warriors overcrowding the easy to get to outdoor spots.

After taking an hour to cover what should have taken minutes we were treated to sweet piece of single track. It climbed through a wooded hill side opening up to a steep rolling descent. Happy to be on course we enjoyed the descent and views.

The trail took us through a swampy area where it connected to another fire road. The road slowly faded into faint ruts that hadn't seen travel in a long time and were covered in prairie grass. Somewhat certain this was the right way we headed East along the road only to come to a barbed wire fence. The fence looked new and had "No Trespassing, Private Property, and Trespassers Will be Shot" signs waving in the breeze like sails. It was a stark contrast to our feeling of freedom and isolation. I couldn't help but think my feelings were similar to those of the native peoples of this land when they first encountered barbed wire fences 150 years earlier.

After another frustrating bout of exploring in all directions for the route, I determined this had to be it. The GPS, map, visible landmarks, and my own positional awareness were all in agreement. This was the right way. I can only assume the fence will be opened for the race. The sun was low on the horizon, it was getting late and Jo didn't want to cross the fence. I wasn't going to force pressing on. Her rational decision making probably saved us from finishing the ride in the dark and cold. Giving up on trying to follow every little turn in the course, I looked at the map and plotted a bearing back to the nearest main road. We rode and walked in a straight line SouthEast. My bearing put us back on the course near the end of the loop 1. Except for a few swamp crossings, and steep bumps we rode with relative ease back to the car.

In total, we pre-rode about half of loop 1 including the most navigationally challenging parts and I have every intersection memorized of what we rode. Although that stupid serial / USB adapter derailed us this time, the trip was valuable pre-race intelligence gathering and a great way to spend the 4th of July. I plan on doing one more recon mission and finishing the remainder of the course before the race.