by site editor Rick McCharles
Race Director Dave Adlard impressed one and all with his passion and tireless effort to make the inaugural ExpID a success.
Check out his wrap-up post for results and highlights – Expedition Idaho: The FINAL Update!.
The top teams transported themselves over 500mi of rugged north Idaho and Montana. Here’s a vastly simplified map of the route.
Mostly on foot, mountain bike and paddle, Dave added dozens of other challenges. Personally I liked “build a raft” and “light a fire” (without matches).
It’s hard on the body. My friends took significant damage moving constantly for 6 days.
… but talk about a life altering experience. Expedition Adventure Racing makes Ironman look trivial.
Winners Thule from Europe just might be the team to beat at Worlds in Tasmania.
I was responsible for the race blog and social media:
» Team Photos | Photos | Videos | Twitter
Though I’m personally not a fan of Twitter, it was our best mode of communication during this race. Multiple people logged in to our account to update from the mountains by mobile phone.
The SPOT devices were almost more trouble than they were worth, working semi-reasonably perhaps 30% of the time. Multiple points of failure: human error, SPOT failure, battery failure, weather interference. The satellite network is unreliable too, it seems.
The one time we really needed SPOT to work, it didn’t. The team needed to climb to elevation to use a mobile phone to call 911 for air evacuation after a bike fall.
My $9.50 Trakfone was far more reliable in the wild than SPOT.
Here’s my favourite photo from the week, nighttime navigation – Team Bones.
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