Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

Hi everyone- Judy and I attended the Red Rock Ride this past weekend in Reno; Judy is selecting for the Pac South Squad for the Pan Am ride, but I’m not, so I got to ride!  Dave Cootware and Susan McCartney were nice enough to offer me a horse to ride with them on the 50, a HUGE 6 year old Anglo Arab named Savannah.  It was her second 50, she was kind of green, and I did survive the rodeo when I got on her, but other than that, she was a lot of fun.  We did the 50 as a slow training ride, but in retrospect went too slow.  I was immediately surprised that I was in Nevada.  What happened to the rocks?  There were none.  The footing was superb, nice trails and roads of sand.  The first few miles to the vet check seemed pretty nice, and basically easy.  People in a hurry could make good time here.  We were going pretty slow, though.  After the check the trail crossed the Red Rock Road, onto more roads.  Still pretty nice so far.  We hopped off the dirt road and started walking up a long canyon, still in the sand.  At the top it was a long, long walk to the bottom of the valley, still in the sand.  There was lots of natural water in the stream along the way.  We walked a long, long way down that valley before starting up another sandy climb back to the top of a ridge of hills that surrounds the base camp.  The trail was nice, but was all sand.   I’m saying sand a lot here, the trail was mostly sand.  Not deep like the beach, but sandy all the way.  We passed up base camp, still on the sandy trails, with lots of up and down.  That was another thing I realized, there was a lot of up and down stuff, roly-poly hills that we were walking up and down.  And worse than that, it was getting pretty hot.  Not horrible, the temp was maybe between 85 and 90 degrees, but no humidity to speak of.   After watching camp disappear behind us, we finally turned around and headed back, up another sandy climb.  A long sandy road took us down back to the road, and into camp for lunch at 24 miles.  It was 12:25 when we got there, but we were at the very back of the pack on the 50.  The horses all came down okay,  we left lunch at 1:30 for the last loop.  We trotted along for a level mile or so in the sand,  but then began another really long, uphill walk in the sand.  This was a long pull that took us forever to get up at a walk.  There were some rolling roads at the top for a bit, but still required a lot of walking up and down.  A really long, steep, downhill trail of sand took us to the valley behind the range.   At this point I knew we were going to have to pick it up or we would have time trouble.  It was already 3:00, and we did not have the vet check at 34 miles in site.  At least we were finally on some roads that were level, but still had some sand on them in parts.   We spent a lot of time at the only water stop between camp and the check, the water was great, and boy, did the horses drink.  Back on the roads and trotting, still no check in site.   Susan’s horse was slowing down and was not happy trotting, so we went slower.  We rounded a bend and could see the valley, and the check WAY, Way out there.  No way.  It was 3:30, and it was easily another 3-4 miles out there.  It had taken us over 2 hours to go about 8 miles, too slow.