The Bone Tempest (BT) event is a joke – one of those great jokes that makes you spontaneously burst out laughing for a few days after hearing it. I think this is the 5th edition, and it was my 3rd time on the “course”.
BT is in the Barkley Marathons tradition of events, probably inspired by Barkley. The format is pretty simple – follow some directions, track down checkpoints along the way, have fun. (Or possibly “fun”.) Similar to some kinds of orienteering races. Not too dissimilar to a trail race where you work your way through a series of aid stations towards a finish line. Except… it’s nothing like those things. There are no trail markers, so you have to know where you are and where you want to go. No aid stations and no on-course support at all, so you have to be self-sufficient for the day. Unlike orienteering races where you have to track down big bright cloth checkpoints that can be seen from some distance, the BT checkpoints are at most 3 inches in diameter and can only be seen if you are in exactly the right place. There’s a bit – meaning a lot – more distance and climbing involved than your typical orienteering event. And we probably got to cover some ground that only other BT people ever go over. One thing that is similar to some orienteering races is that we could choose/design our own route – skip legs, do partial legs, visit random checkpoints. In theory, the winner is the person who collects the most checkpoints. But the goal is really just to challenge yourself and enjoy beautiful and often out-of-the way places.
The event was started by my friends Eric and Ginny, before I knew them. They are pretty well known in the crazy race world. E.g. Ginny was accepted to Barkley once (but couldn’t run due to injury). Eric and Ginny seem to spend all of their time exploring game trails, creek beds and ridge lines, and then Eric maps them carefully and figures out clever/devious ways of connecting things. (Look up The Sneffels Round/Sneffelupagus to get a sense for his genius – “a mountaineering challenge with a 100 hour time limit”.) Anyway, these gnarly adventure runners came up with a challenge in a park north of San Francisco and invited some crazy friends to try it. I showed up a couple years later and loved it. Then Eric and Ginny moved away and handed it off to our mutual friend Samir (who I met in the same race where I met Eric and Ginny). With the help of two more seriously badass friends, Samir made the event happen one more time in 2020 (my second) and then COVID shut everything down about 3 days later. I thought the event was dead – no peep for the past 2 years – but out of the blue a couple months ago Samir said it was on again. With a new-and-improved “Supercourse” no less. Sounded like a good time, so off I went.
12 of us showed up just before sunrise Sat morning – I had endured miles or crossed paths with at least half of them, and had watched a couple other people fly away from me previously at the starts of Bone Tempest and/or Euchre Bar. At 7am we set off. The Supercourse consisted of 7 different legs, with roughly 35 checkpoints along the way. We had to finish by sunset – 7:20pm. Samir estimated the full distance to be 36 miles, posted an elevation profile pre-race that showed 16000 feet of climbing, and guessed that it would be “impressive” if anyone could do the whole course. We’ll get back to this later…
In an event where following directions is critical, the entire pack of us – including the race director – missed a turn within the first 50 yards, so we all backed up and got on course. The next mile+ was on a real trail, and as usual I got dropped almost immediately by people who are younger, faster, better, and/or who can see roots and rocks better in dim light. Better to stay upright than bite it on the easy part at the start of the day. After a mile we entered our first creek. This was probably the most notable thing about the Supercourse – instead of traveling 1/4 mile slowly in trail-less creek beds one or two times like in previous editions, we had the opportunity to do it for several miles through the day if we wanted. Looking at a map, I covered maybe 1.5 linear miles in creek beds. Looking at Strava, I traveled 4 miles in those same creek beds. It’s possible both are true. These are not nice little flat beds with a trickle of water flowing next to a pleasant path. These creek beds fall steeply down a mountain, they were filled with water from all the recent rain, and they run between two steep banks that are always some combo of cliffy rocks, loose soil and/or brush and fallen trees. There was a lot of going sideways trying to find ways to move forward.
One of the best things about this event is getting to spend time with great people I rarely see. There were a handful in this case, but I’ll call out two.
The last time I did this, I ended up spending the day with a woman named Tina, who is um, accomplished as an ultrarunner. 7-time Hardrock finisher, 5 time Bone Tempest runner, winner of the Hurt 100k, participant in almost every crazy race out there, etc.. And also a good person to spend time with when you are doing something that isn’t such a great idea. We travel at roughly the same speed and seem to have a similar sense about “not a great idea but workable” vs. “ok, that’s too insane”. She was there, I was there, and we ended up spending another good day together.
I was also really excited to see Bruce, who I met several years ago before my first Western States. He is also accomplished, e.g. he’s listed among ~50 people who have at least 10 sub-24 hour finishes at WS. He gave me a lot of good advice before WS, later told me about the rough experience he’d just had finishing yet another WS – which helped me when I had a similar problem in another race – and provided an awesome highlight in my first running at WS. Bruce captains one of the later WS aid stations. When I got there tired and somewhat humbled, I wanted to thank him for all kinds of help that had made my race experience better. When I arrived though, he was on the phone with a friend. I hovered around him for several minutes as the race clock kept ticking, so at some point he handed me the phone and said “say hi”. “Hi, who’s this?” “Hi Mark, this is Ann Trason, you’re doing great…” (For anyone familiar with ultrarunning and Western States in particular, Ann Trason would easily fit in a sentence with Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, and Serena Williams.) Anyway… Bruce is a warm, wonderful person and although he is a much better runner than me, he’s got a few extra years and is recovering from a recent illness. So in the early part of the race, it was Tina, Bruce, our friend Jim (another questionable-judgment person I’ve crossed paths with) and me trying to figure out how to keep moving forward.
There’s a video of me butt-sliding 30 feet down a hill. I’m not going to include that because it might create the (FALSE!) impression that we didn’t strictly adhere to Leave No Trace. But I was going to end up sliding down that hill whether it was on purpose and semi-controlled, or accidental and out-of-control. Tina actually did it first, and Bruce and Jim followed me – it was the preferred method of travel in that spot.
I also fell backwards while climbing up a slippery rock and landed on my back in the creek, with everything getting wet except the front pockets of my vest (where my phone was). At that moment Tina, Bruce, and Jim were all out of sight ahead of me – I briefly thanked the universe that I hadn’t hit my head on a rock, then hauled myself out and continued on.
Several times through the day, especially in the beginning, I would pull/push myself up something steep and stop suddenly as my head collided with an overhanging branch. I didn’t come home with a lot of wounds, but half of those I got were on my head. Wearing my hat was plus/minus – it blocked my vision upwards and made collisions more likely, but cushioned the blows somewhat.
We never found the second checkpoint, because it wasn’t there anymore. It was supposed to be in a “small grotto” on one side of the creek. The 4 of us carefully examined every grotto-like thing in and above the entire creek between a road and a trail, and I even retraced my steps near the beginning thinking maybe it was closer to the road than I thought. But at the end of the day we learned that no one found it – including Samir who put it there originally. What kind of dumbhead goes trinket-hunting up a trail-less creek? (Oh… wait…)
This all happened in the first few miles and set the tone for how it would go.
Before the race, I estimated how long each leg would take – it was obvious that I would not be one of the “impressive” finishers who did the whole thing. I conservatively estimated that the first leg – 5.7 miles, 3800 feet of climbing according to the directions – would take me 3 1/2 hours, but also thought “I hope it doesn’t take THAT long”. Proving the adage “careful what you wish for”, I got my wish – it didn’t take THAT long, it took 5 hours.
At one point, Tina said to me “this is one of those inverted pace situations, instead of 4 miles per hour it’s 4 hours per mile”. This video of Tina shows why. In 25 seconds she makes about 15 feet of forward progress – do the math and that works out to 3-4 hours per mile.
So… after 5 hours we eventually reached the summit and end of the first leg.
While refilling water near the top, I ran into Loren, one of the people who sometimes finishes these things. He’d just completed the second leg. Tina and I did some quick math – Loren had done 2 legs in 5 hours, we were traveling half his speed, 2 legs would take us 10 hours, we had 12+ hours before we had to finish. And so we quickly decided that we should do whatever part of the course was most appealing instead of sticking with The Program. There was a section of the course neither of us had seen, so we went from the end of leg A to the start of … leg F.
Thanks to Ginny, Eric, and Samir, the instructions came with explanations of how to jump ahead. In this case, to get from A to F all we had to do was cover 5-ish miles, making about 15 different turns on real/semi-real/imaginary/non-existent trails along the way. That part went pretty smoothly but still took a couple hours. And we collected a bonus checkpoint at The Throne.
Leg F had two sections, a steep descent to a creek confluence followed by a hard climb back out, and then a longer descent down to the ocean. We’d both been to the ocean before and were more interested in the creek confluence section. Partly because neither of us had seen it, but also because there’s a landmark there named after Tina – Tina’s Tussock. We got to the road overlooking the ocean, surveyed the ridges below us and carefully selected our descent ridge (the directions told us to select carefully, and we’re diligent direction-followers).
The first part was awesome – running down a faint trail on a grassy ridge looking towards the ocean. Then we hit some woods and that was ok. After that it gradually got worse and worse. Steeper and steeper, a big section of long-burnt manzanita (better than live manzanita but still slow), then some steep messy blowdowny brush stuff (Tina tumbled there and rolled sideways 10 feet down the hill), and finally a very steep drop into the confluence between two creek forks. Strava says we dropped 1000 feet in the bottom half mile – about a 40% incline on average, but it felt like it got steeper still towards the bottom.
After admiring the beauty of the confluence for, oh, 10 seconds, and giving thanks for having survived the descent, we were rewarded by getting to turn up yet another steep creek bed, with a fallen tree completely blocking our path in the first 15 feet. So we climbed through loose soil up and around, and went back to creek slogging. We did find Tina’s Tussock – I was there when history was made and Tina saw her Tussock for the first time. And we eventually found the checkpoint.
Getting back out of the creek was simple. Not easy, but simple. Simply crawl up a very steep hill with loose soil and lots of poison oak for a long long time, and pop out at some picnic benches 1800 feet above the confluence. Voila!
(Brief advertisement here for Tecnu and Mean Green Power Hand Scrub – although I literally crawled through poison oak, I washed with Tecnu afterwards and only got two dime-sized rashes on an elbow. Those have dried up within a few days thanks to liberal use of MGPHS – a tip I got from one of the Euchre Bar runners.)
Once we found the picnic benches, we guessed that if we moved along and didn’t get lost, we could just make it back to the start before time ran out. Using Gaia to figure out where to go, we covered 5 miles in a couple hours – collecting 0 checkpoints along the way, although at one point Tina had to physically restrain me from trying to turn up yet another creek for one last checkpoint. We did happen to pass through the Mountain Theater – I hadn’t been there for 4+ decades, since my high school graduation.
I kind of wore out in this last section and got a bit whiny with Tina about having to traverse a not-really-that-steep grassy hillside that I didn’t want to slide down – she probably rolled her eyes but she was ahead of me and I didn’t see that. But we eventually made it back, with nearly 2 minutes to spare. (We should have gone to that last checkpoint in the creek – I’m sure it would have worked…) Tina and I are claiming we deserve bonus points for Maximum “Fun” In The Allowed Time, since most people had gone home by then. We said hi to a few people still there – including Bruce, who had no choice since Tina was riding with him. And then headed for the Tecnu.
Of ~35 possible checkpoints, I think Tina and I collected 9 and did 1 1/2 legs of the course. Loren – who sometimes finishes these things – did about 3 1/2 legs, so maybe half the course. It’s possible someone did a little more than Loren but I doubt it. Samir advertised “36 miles and 16000 feet”. My watch claims we covered 20 miles and did about 10000 feet of climbing in 1 1/2 legs – I kind of trust the elevation but am not sure about the distance. I suspect some of that distance is due to accumulated gps error while moving very slowly in creeks, but we WERE going back and forth in the creeks a lot looking for ways to move forward. (Also, our numbers include both official course and the miles we did to jump from leg A to leg F and then back to the start from the mid-point of leg F.) For half the course, Loren got 26 miles and 13000 feet. Consistent with these types of races, your mileage may vary significantly from what the sticker advertises. I think it would take me 30 hours to finish the whole course – we had about 12. And none of that matters. The goal was to have an adventure outside with friends, and that was definitely accomplished. This race is like Disneyland for adventure runners – you can’t do it all in a day.
A few quick thank you’s: Ginny and Eric for creating this beast, Samir/James/Loren for keeping it going three years ago, Samir for making it even more beastly this year and doing an awful lot of work for the sake of 12 people, Tina for tolerating me again and (hopefully) being ok with me stealing a few of her photos, and my friends J&D who gave me a comfortable and welcoming place to stay during my 45 hours in CA when I spent most of that time sleeping or doing something silly. And as always, Janet for enabling me to make a quick trip south.
The Schedule 