Adventure Racing (Trekking) 11:06:00 [3]
Things started off well for us. Quick 20 minute TA and then we swam across the river. Didn't find the first trail but headed on without over thinking it and picked up the second trail crossing. Over to CP4 without a problem. Instead of the long bushwhack to CP5 we opted to use trails as much as possible, thus went east and then bushwhacked down to another trail which would get us to within 1 km of CP5, however this proved ill advised as the trails were generally overgrown with many unmapped trails lying around as well. Spent too much time near Seesee Lake trying to relocate ourselves. 'Bent was playing wonderful host at CP5 dishing out cheese, crackers and coffee which was super nice.
We also took an interesting route out of CP5 as we chose to cross the water at the very northwestern tip of Little Wilson Lake (believing it would be the shortest crossing and least deep option) - the climb down to waters edge was way too steep but we made it down on the second attempt. The water crossing was great as it was only 20 feet across and waist deep. Once on the other side we headed due south trying to hit an unmapped trail we identified on a trail guide we had the night before. We hit something and continued on it for what seemed a very very long time. we were worried that it kept going southwest instead of southeast. At points it was going northwest, west, northeast, east, south, etc - pretty much every possible direction and confusing the heck out of us. Coupled with the fact that it was not very distinct and a few spurs in the trail had us guessing. We were hanging on a prayer and really did not have a good sense at all where we were. We finally hit a large logging road and continued south on it which eneded up being the right road to the TA. We wasted a good 3 hours in the marshy area 1km south of Little Wilson Lake.
The encouraging thing was that our team stuck through it all and we all tried to help MJ relocate us on the map using whatever faint features we could make out in the night. It was a long walk/slog to the TA.
While I was not navigating this race, taking that hat, I probably would have liked to have seen more trails filled in on the map - for instance, the major C trail snowmobile trail south of Wislon Lake going west was showing as a dead end but in reality would continue on to hit hwy 69.
Except for the troubles we had a the end of the leg, the Trek was my most enjoyable portion of the race - and one of my strongest. My legs felt strong and I really enjoyed the lakes and forest.