PQ Prep in Washington
Written by Ryan Van Gorder Created Date: Wednesday, 22 July 2009 14:24
This past weekend Aaron Rinn and Myself, RVG, joined a handful of other Pacific Northwest seasoned racers in the fourth annual Peterisoba. This is an underground AR that is held just out of North Bend, WA and is within 45 minutes of Downtown Seattle. A majority of the race took place on the mountains that divide the North and Middle Forks of the Snoqualmie Rivers and had up to 9,000 feet of climbing and took teams from a base elevation of 1,000 feet up to the Green Mt peak of nearly 5,500. This was exactly what both of us needed to help get us primed for PQ.
The race started off with a short bike with a switch to a river run or creekteering, to ensure that everyone's feet were soaked. A quick trek up a ridge, a small bushwhack and a fun rappel down had everyone pumped. From there we were off Climbing up 2,500 feet for our first views of the race. From there we bombed back down to the North Fork of the Snoqualmie river where we bumped into a handful of gold miners...thought we went through a time warp.
The next three hours were filled with Steep climbing and navigating our way up to Green Mt. via old logging roads. Lucky for me my bikes are in the shop and Aaron let me borrow the Orange Bomber, which had a loose cassette and no way to torque in granny gear without issues. This made for some painful biking and lots of dismount practice. Soon enough we ditched the bikes and were on foot trekking to Green Mt and then the next mountain to the south. From there we ridge ran back to the North and dropped to the end of the line and then bushwhacked/boulder hopped to our next road...was this perhaps the access to road to Bessemer? Soon enough we were bombing towards the TA to a 12 hour rogaine and glad to get our buts and heavy packs off of our bikes.
We decided we wanted to take some time with our route planning and come up with a rogaine loop that made sense. It would be a clockwise loop and we would not go for any of the 90 pointers that were out of reach. By the time we got back we had completed our loop but learned that the Race Director was baiting unsuspecting racers into attempting short bushwhacks through the depths of hell, or dense thorn and mosquito infested areas. So we started opting out of the more aggressive CP's and sticking to the loop. We by no means won the rogaine but were able to post relatively good results on both legs enough so to land on top of the ranking. It was an honor to see the local racers out and about on the course and to be able to participate in such a stellar event in our backyard!
