Mt. Grant Memorial Challenge 2015
When I moved to Las Vegas in 2009, I often drove up to Reno for a gambling weekend. This makes total sense :-) Because I still had friends in the Bay Area and it was closer for them and there were more of them than me. Also I enjoy driving, blah blah. Although my first drive from Reno to LV was several years earlier for a WSOP trip.
Anyway I like Googling about the small towns I drive through, and Walker Lake/Hawthorne were always interesting, especially because of the bleak/futuristic/whatever-looking image of the bunkers etc. of the Hawthorne Army Depot. I also learned about the nearby Mt. Grant, and that although it had previously been open for hiking etc. they had closed it off after 9/11. But, they were also opening it up for a Memorial Challenge race/hike.
It sounded interesting, but I kept having scheduling conflicts, vacations w/parents or other plans I committed to before finding out when each year's challenge was going to be. So after the two Grand Canyon hikes in 2012 and 2014, doing the Mt. Grant Challenge seemed like a good next step, and I was determined not to miss it this time so very early on I blocked out the first 3 weeks of September just to be sure I had all the bases covered :-)
Joining me were two-time Rim-to-Rim lunatic^Whiking partner Roger, Roger's friend Steve, and Michael Hunter. Roger and I staged in Tahoe Thursday night after work, arriving in Hawthorne by mid-afternoon and meeting up with MPH in time for the brief memorial parade. The parade appeared to consist mainly of people signed up for the challenge and local police/fire units. The communications and flyers we'd received prior to the event pretty clearly invited us to participate, but speaking only for myself, I would've felt a bit awkward taking part, a bit like I was intruding. I honestly think this is purely internal neurosis and we would have been welcomed, but all the same, I was ok just watching from the side.
We did gather with everyone at the local VFW memorial park where the flag was returned to the flagpole (I was briefly confused by how they did this until I recalled reading somewhere that the correct procedure for raising a flag to half-staff is to raise it all the way and pause briefly before lowering it to half-staff; also Wikipedia just taught me that "half-staff" is the correct term for non-nautical applications). There were some remarks, the singing of the Star-Spangled Banner, and then a spaghetti dinner (and also walk-up registrations and check-in for preregs like us).
On Saturday morning some people doing the half-Challenge were driven up part of the way around 6:30 am; those of us doing the full challenge gathered shortly thereafter and started out pretty close to the scheduled start of 7 am.
The first bit was on paved road, and immediately the cohesive group (~90 people in all, or at least I believe the highest bib number was in the 90s) smeared out into sort of a pace gradient, including one guy way the hell out in front, not trail running per se, but certainly going at a killer walking pace. Would love to know how quickly he got to the top (one report I read in my pre-trip research indicated a past year participant finished in 4h49m, wow). After a short ways the pavement gave way to a wide and reasonably well-maintained dirt road (which continued all the way to the top).
[Mile markers etc. mostly reconstructed from memory/photo timestamps so some details may be slightly out of order/inaccurate but everything here is macroscopically true...]
Of the four of us, MPH quickly established a lead, and Roger/Steve pulled steadily away from me. I was (still am) suffering from a head cold, plus generally being a slob and not seriously training for this at all. The initial few miles were relatively steep (compared to the trail gaining ~7000 feet overall in ~17 miles). Around milepost 3, things improved vastly, I think because (a) I stopped caring about containing the sniffles and started blowing my nose liberally into my shirtsleeves (b) the trail leveled out (c) one of the support golf carts (I say "golf cart" throughout this report but that may not be strictly accurate, anyway picture a pretty rugged vehicle like a golf cart or slightly larger but less than a jeep) drove by on its way to the first aid station at the ~3.2 mile point and offered me a Gatorade (d) I'd consumed a couple Shot Bloks and they were starting to kick in. This stands out pretty well in the My Tracks graph as a noticeable increase in average speed beween miles 3-7 or so.
Somewhere in here, I encountered Steve coming back downhill. "You're going the wrong way! :-)" It turns out he'd forgotten his trekking poles at the aid station. Shortly thereafter I caught up with Roger who was walking slowly to wait for Steve. I decided to make the most of my energy burst and left him behind. I started flagging a bit at milepost 6 but shortly thereafter hit the next aid station, and while I was briefly resting and downing another Gatorate, Roger and Steve caught up. I did leave before them, but they finally caught up with me for good before the next station at 9.x (the stations/checkpoints were just about perfectly spaced for my needs).
I won't lie, the view wasn't nearly as good as the Grand Canyon :-) I think the general consensus among non-locals (vast majority seemed to be local, signicant minority from nearby places like Tonopah, and a small handful of folks like us from CA etc.) is that it was an interesting (and of course "challenging") experience but probably once was enough :-) At first the trail leads fairly steadily west up a canyon, then turns and heads mostly south, so for much of the route there's not a lot of variety of things to look at other than the mountains surrounding you and the road climbing in front of you. So from the perspective of US95 and Walker Lake you're making a big circle counterclockwise and coming up the back side of Mt. Grant. Not sure when the peak first became visible but I think I first noticed it and took a pic somewhere between mile 6-7, still way too far off to even contemplate just how ludicrously far away it was :-) (The location and picture in this article jibe with mine anyway)
Again looking at my graph, there is a steady decline in average pace from mile 7 onward. I don't know if it was planned or just worked out that way, but after 9.x the next two checkpoints were spaced closer together, one shortly after 11 at a junction called "Turkey Tracks" named for the how the three roads look from air as they converge. I took a slightly longer break here, and as I was resting two people got up and someone called after them "hey, did one of you leave your pack?" Except, we'd all been given race-style bibs (with one tear-off stub that we deposited at the start of the event, and another that we were to turn in at the end so they could physically account for everyone). The person in question had a bib attached to his shirt, but the backpack also sported a bib, whereupon I recognized the number as being in our party (we had a sequence of 4 numbers). It turned out Steve was in one of the portable toilets :-) I think he was looking for a change of pace because he obligingly accompanied me in my slow trudge from there to 13.4.
At 13.4 I again took a decent break, as the next checkpoint was I think closer to 16. The peak was well in sight here, and Steve and I observed "The hike really isn't too bad. If you could start here." For me the part after 13 was by far the toughest stretch, as I'd been feeling the effects of the altitude (in terms of energy/breathing I mean, no altitude sickness symptoms) for a while and I was pretty much drained. I had to take frequent mini-breaks and in general do a lot of psyching myself up to keep pushing. Early on when the head cold symptoms had really been bothering me, I actually wondered if I'd even be able to finish the hike under my own power. In the middle portions I had become increasingly confident, but around 14-15 I was starting to have doubts again. In a way it helped that I was passed frequently by vehicles in both directions, vans/jeeps ferrying people downhill after completing the half-challenge, golf carts transferring supplies etc. I decided there would be no real shame in giving up and being transported the rest of the way to the top, but I also really really wanted to complete it for real. So there was a lot of looking down and just mindlessly putting one foot in front of the other.
At 15.x a golf cart passed me going downhill with one of the main coordinators and what I assumed were her two kids, whom I'd seen several times throughout the day going one way or the other. "How much further is it?" "Just this one more switchback [these were long, broad curvy switchbacks, bearing in mind this is a fire/utility road] to the memorial... you don't have to go all the way to the top if you don't want" (pre-hike literature suggested that from the official end of the Challenge, it was another 20-40 minutes to the tippy top). As she said this, I kinda just assumed she was lying. She was. Or she was just being deceitfully encouraging :-) After rounding the "final" switchback I could see an American flag and some vehicles near the top, and counted 4-5 more switchbacks. However one of them turned out to contain, hidden from below, the final checkpoint before the summit. Here I found Roger who had already been up and back. I took my longest break here, steeling myself for the final assault, and departed leaving all my gear behind and taking only a water bottle and my trekking poles. This was still damned difficult, but easier than 14-16 because the end was in sight and some trace residual amount of adrenaline kicked in.
When I did finally reach the top, a beaming volunteer handed me my reward: a Mt. Grant Challenge completion coin and, for some reason, a fun size piece of Abba-Zaba and took my picture in front of the finish line banner. Since it seemed I had time, I asked about the actual summit, and was told there was a can holding a geocache/sign-in register somewhere on the side closest to us, and also the actual USGS benchmark on the other side. He said some people go around and up the side but the time he'd done it he'd just gone straight up the face that was toward us.
This turned out to be a Class 3 scramble, which is a pretty dicey proposition with exhausted mind and body after 17 miles and 7000 feet of hiking. I don't merely say this in hindsight; at the time, I stopped twice and seriously considered just giving up and going back down, but (a) it felt like this was going to be a one-time opportunity and (b) the second time I had 100% decided to give up on the true summit and head down when I heard a cough above me, turned my head and saw someone surprisingly close. "Is that the top?" Affirmative. I allowed that I was thinking about turning around and she said "Why, does it look impassable? You're so close!" and urged me to continue. She said she'd come around from the side, which in Googling around is supposedly a lot easier (thanks a lot, volunteer guy). I also said something about maybe following her down but she ditched me and was long gone when I reached the top maybe 5 minutes later :-/
To be honest I found the sign-in register entirely by accident -- I'd set down my trekking poles (which, again in retrospect, I would have left at 16, because I didn't need them to hike the final stretch and they were almost impediments on the talus because I needed my hands a lot) and walked 5-6 feet away to take some pics with a better view and when I turned back to pick them up again I saw the coffee can wedged into the crevice right below them :-) After that I carefully picked my way back down more or less the way I came, figuring that was sort of a known quantity (on my way up I had tried to select my route keeping in mind the eventual need to reverse the path), and had the added benefit of being mostly in view of the people stationed at the finish line below in case I needed to yell for help etc.
In conclusion, I am glad I did this, although I wish I had been in better shape for it. I do think it's just as well that I wasn't able to do it until this year, as it helped experience-wise to have the two Rim-to-Rim hikes under my belt. On the other hand those might have contributed to false confidence that it wouldn't be as relatively hard as it ended up being. We did less prep for R2R'14 than we did for R2R'12, and I've been quite busy lately so did practically zero intensive training for this. I have previously entertained the fantasy of doing Badwater (-292) to Telescope Peak (11k) in Death Valley but unless that is preceded by some killer training regimen, I think that will have to remain firmly in fantasyland...
Public Facebook photo links:
Friday memorial parade in Hawthorne
photos from the hike
KMZ/Google Maps overlay
Anyway I like Googling about the small towns I drive through, and Walker Lake/Hawthorne were always interesting, especially because of the bleak/futuristic/whatever-looking image of the bunkers etc. of the Hawthorne Army Depot. I also learned about the nearby Mt. Grant, and that although it had previously been open for hiking etc. they had closed it off after 9/11. But, they were also opening it up for a Memorial Challenge race/hike.
It sounded interesting, but I kept having scheduling conflicts, vacations w/parents or other plans I committed to before finding out when each year's challenge was going to be. So after the two Grand Canyon hikes in 2012 and 2014, doing the Mt. Grant Challenge seemed like a good next step, and I was determined not to miss it this time so very early on I blocked out the first 3 weeks of September just to be sure I had all the bases covered :-)
Joining me were two-time Rim-to-Rim lunatic^Whiking partner Roger, Roger's friend Steve, and Michael Hunter. Roger and I staged in Tahoe Thursday night after work, arriving in Hawthorne by mid-afternoon and meeting up with MPH in time for the brief memorial parade. The parade appeared to consist mainly of people signed up for the challenge and local police/fire units. The communications and flyers we'd received prior to the event pretty clearly invited us to participate, but speaking only for myself, I would've felt a bit awkward taking part, a bit like I was intruding. I honestly think this is purely internal neurosis and we would have been welcomed, but all the same, I was ok just watching from the side.
We did gather with everyone at the local VFW memorial park where the flag was returned to the flagpole (I was briefly confused by how they did this until I recalled reading somewhere that the correct procedure for raising a flag to half-staff is to raise it all the way and pause briefly before lowering it to half-staff; also Wikipedia just taught me that "half-staff" is the correct term for non-nautical applications). There were some remarks, the singing of the Star-Spangled Banner, and then a spaghetti dinner (and also walk-up registrations and check-in for preregs like us).
On Saturday morning some people doing the half-Challenge were driven up part of the way around 6:30 am; those of us doing the full challenge gathered shortly thereafter and started out pretty close to the scheduled start of 7 am.
The first bit was on paved road, and immediately the cohesive group (~90 people in all, or at least I believe the highest bib number was in the 90s) smeared out into sort of a pace gradient, including one guy way the hell out in front, not trail running per se, but certainly going at a killer walking pace. Would love to know how quickly he got to the top (one report I read in my pre-trip research indicated a past year participant finished in 4h49m, wow). After a short ways the pavement gave way to a wide and reasonably well-maintained dirt road (which continued all the way to the top).
[Mile markers etc. mostly reconstructed from memory/photo timestamps so some details may be slightly out of order/inaccurate but everything here is macroscopically true...]
Of the four of us, MPH quickly established a lead, and Roger/Steve pulled steadily away from me. I was (still am) suffering from a head cold, plus generally being a slob and not seriously training for this at all. The initial few miles were relatively steep (compared to the trail gaining ~7000 feet overall in ~17 miles). Around milepost 3, things improved vastly, I think because (a) I stopped caring about containing the sniffles and started blowing my nose liberally into my shirtsleeves (b) the trail leveled out (c) one of the support golf carts (I say "golf cart" throughout this report but that may not be strictly accurate, anyway picture a pretty rugged vehicle like a golf cart or slightly larger but less than a jeep) drove by on its way to the first aid station at the ~3.2 mile point and offered me a Gatorade (d) I'd consumed a couple Shot Bloks and they were starting to kick in. This stands out pretty well in the My Tracks graph as a noticeable increase in average speed beween miles 3-7 or so.
Somewhere in here, I encountered Steve coming back downhill. "You're going the wrong way! :-)" It turns out he'd forgotten his trekking poles at the aid station. Shortly thereafter I caught up with Roger who was walking slowly to wait for Steve. I decided to make the most of my energy burst and left him behind. I started flagging a bit at milepost 6 but shortly thereafter hit the next aid station, and while I was briefly resting and downing another Gatorate, Roger and Steve caught up. I did leave before them, but they finally caught up with me for good before the next station at 9.x (the stations/checkpoints were just about perfectly spaced for my needs).
I won't lie, the view wasn't nearly as good as the Grand Canyon :-) I think the general consensus among non-locals (vast majority seemed to be local, signicant minority from nearby places like Tonopah, and a small handful of folks like us from CA etc.) is that it was an interesting (and of course "challenging") experience but probably once was enough :-) At first the trail leads fairly steadily west up a canyon, then turns and heads mostly south, so for much of the route there's not a lot of variety of things to look at other than the mountains surrounding you and the road climbing in front of you. So from the perspective of US95 and Walker Lake you're making a big circle counterclockwise and coming up the back side of Mt. Grant. Not sure when the peak first became visible but I think I first noticed it and took a pic somewhere between mile 6-7, still way too far off to even contemplate just how ludicrously far away it was :-) (The location and picture in this article jibe with mine anyway)
Again looking at my graph, there is a steady decline in average pace from mile 7 onward. I don't know if it was planned or just worked out that way, but after 9.x the next two checkpoints were spaced closer together, one shortly after 11 at a junction called "Turkey Tracks" named for the how the three roads look from air as they converge. I took a slightly longer break here, and as I was resting two people got up and someone called after them "hey, did one of you leave your pack?" Except, we'd all been given race-style bibs (with one tear-off stub that we deposited at the start of the event, and another that we were to turn in at the end so they could physically account for everyone). The person in question had a bib attached to his shirt, but the backpack also sported a bib, whereupon I recognized the number as being in our party (we had a sequence of 4 numbers). It turned out Steve was in one of the portable toilets :-) I think he was looking for a change of pace because he obligingly accompanied me in my slow trudge from there to 13.4.
At 13.4 I again took a decent break, as the next checkpoint was I think closer to 16. The peak was well in sight here, and Steve and I observed "The hike really isn't too bad. If you could start here." For me the part after 13 was by far the toughest stretch, as I'd been feeling the effects of the altitude (in terms of energy/breathing I mean, no altitude sickness symptoms) for a while and I was pretty much drained. I had to take frequent mini-breaks and in general do a lot of psyching myself up to keep pushing. Early on when the head cold symptoms had really been bothering me, I actually wondered if I'd even be able to finish the hike under my own power. In the middle portions I had become increasingly confident, but around 14-15 I was starting to have doubts again. In a way it helped that I was passed frequently by vehicles in both directions, vans/jeeps ferrying people downhill after completing the half-challenge, golf carts transferring supplies etc. I decided there would be no real shame in giving up and being transported the rest of the way to the top, but I also really really wanted to complete it for real. So there was a lot of looking down and just mindlessly putting one foot in front of the other.
At 15.x a golf cart passed me going downhill with one of the main coordinators and what I assumed were her two kids, whom I'd seen several times throughout the day going one way or the other. "How much further is it?" "Just this one more switchback [these were long, broad curvy switchbacks, bearing in mind this is a fire/utility road] to the memorial... you don't have to go all the way to the top if you don't want" (pre-hike literature suggested that from the official end of the Challenge, it was another 20-40 minutes to the tippy top). As she said this, I kinda just assumed she was lying. She was. Or she was just being deceitfully encouraging :-) After rounding the "final" switchback I could see an American flag and some vehicles near the top, and counted 4-5 more switchbacks. However one of them turned out to contain, hidden from below, the final checkpoint before the summit. Here I found Roger who had already been up and back. I took my longest break here, steeling myself for the final assault, and departed leaving all my gear behind and taking only a water bottle and my trekking poles. This was still damned difficult, but easier than 14-16 because the end was in sight and some trace residual amount of adrenaline kicked in.
When I did finally reach the top, a beaming volunteer handed me my reward: a Mt. Grant Challenge completion coin and, for some reason, a fun size piece of Abba-Zaba and took my picture in front of the finish line banner. Since it seemed I had time, I asked about the actual summit, and was told there was a can holding a geocache/sign-in register somewhere on the side closest to us, and also the actual USGS benchmark on the other side. He said some people go around and up the side but the time he'd done it he'd just gone straight up the face that was toward us.
This turned out to be a Class 3 scramble, which is a pretty dicey proposition with exhausted mind and body after 17 miles and 7000 feet of hiking. I don't merely say this in hindsight; at the time, I stopped twice and seriously considered just giving up and going back down, but (a) it felt like this was going to be a one-time opportunity and (b) the second time I had 100% decided to give up on the true summit and head down when I heard a cough above me, turned my head and saw someone surprisingly close. "Is that the top?" Affirmative. I allowed that I was thinking about turning around and she said "Why, does it look impassable? You're so close!" and urged me to continue. She said she'd come around from the side, which in Googling around is supposedly a lot easier (thanks a lot, volunteer guy). I also said something about maybe following her down but she ditched me and was long gone when I reached the top maybe 5 minutes later :-/
To be honest I found the sign-in register entirely by accident -- I'd set down my trekking poles (which, again in retrospect, I would have left at 16, because I didn't need them to hike the final stretch and they were almost impediments on the talus because I needed my hands a lot) and walked 5-6 feet away to take some pics with a better view and when I turned back to pick them up again I saw the coffee can wedged into the crevice right below them :-) After that I carefully picked my way back down more or less the way I came, figuring that was sort of a known quantity (on my way up I had tried to select my route keeping in mind the eventual need to reverse the path), and had the added benefit of being mostly in view of the people stationed at the finish line below in case I needed to yell for help etc.
In conclusion, I am glad I did this, although I wish I had been in better shape for it. I do think it's just as well that I wasn't able to do it until this year, as it helped experience-wise to have the two Rim-to-Rim hikes under my belt. On the other hand those might have contributed to false confidence that it wouldn't be as relatively hard as it ended up being. We did less prep for R2R'14 than we did for R2R'12, and I've been quite busy lately so did practically zero intensive training for this. I have previously entertained the fantasy of doing Badwater (-292) to Telescope Peak (11k) in Death Valley but unless that is preceded by some killer training regimen, I think that will have to remain firmly in fantasyland...
Public Facebook photo links:
Friday memorial parade in Hawthorne
photos from the hike
KMZ/Google Maps overlay