NORSA Adventure Racing Team Debuts at the 2007 Gold Nugget!

This past weekend, members of the NORSA Adventure Racing Team (Mike Rhodes, Alan Stewart, Tim Josey, and Adam) competed in the "Dirty Dozen" category of the 2007 Gold Nugget Adventure Race. Taking place in and around the Uhwarrie National Forest in south-central North Carolina, this 12 hour race was a combination of mountain biking, trail-running, bushwacking, canoeing, orienteering, and a high ropes course.

Trip Report and Photos by Alan Stewart:

"We arrived Friday late afternoon and set up camp at Morrow Mountain State before heading down to God's Country Outfitters to check in with the race director. There were many other racers there, including a two man team and from Erie, Pennsylvania who remarked that "we wanted to get in one more before we went to nationals." They apparently do many 24 hour races and made themselves out to be quite the hotshots (despite the fact that they were staying in a hotel friday night). Our other favorite quote was... "You guys have altimeters on your watches right?" We must have asked each other about 100 times during the race.."TIM! whats the altimeter reading? I think we're almost there!" They were nice guys though; fun to talk to.

Afterwards, we hit up the Walmart Supercenter for supplies, headed back to camp, ate dinner, and did some last minute rigging. Racing started at 6:45am.

We were up at 6am and after the pre-briefing, with a blow of the horn at 7:00 AM, it was a mad dash to the top of Morrow Mt. to get our maps and passports. The trail was composed of very steep switchbacks for about 3 miles and NORSA's biking experience showed through as we were the first ones to the top. We felt good biking in close formation and passing other teams with ease (and maybe pushing a little hard so early on). We joked later that the newbies were saying "holy shit," while the old guys were calling us "newbies."

We plotted our points, headed back down to the get the boats, crossed the river, and got to the transition area without incident. Our first stop was check point (CP) 2 where we completed the special challenge: a high ropes course. The course was pretty easy but waiting in line for 15 minutes to get on the stupid thing was hard. We were all feeling really good.

Next, we were off on our bikes. We hit all the waypoints designed for the bike (near a bike or jeep trail) over the course of six hours of HARD riding over extreme grades and rocks with brief moments of jogging through woods to a CP. We had to backtrack once after getting a little exited on a downhill run and blowing by a CP worth 40 points. We finally finished the bike course with about 5:30 hrs remaining. We got in the boats again and went for the canoe points.

We decided (for some reason) that we could hit the canoe CP's faster by landing and running through the woods instead of paddling. We landed and started running. We were off by about a 1/2 mile on the first point. It took us a while to figure it out but we eventually got it (it was hanging off a limb over the water, imagine that). The second one took us pretty far off course but we found it (well Adam did) by literally he just stumbling upon it walking toward the river.

The return to the boats took us onto to a road where we jogged for a while before taking a creek bed back to the canoes (a pretty major detour). By this time we were down to 1hr and we needed to get back to base camp.

We made it across the river post haste, hurried up the trail to base camp, and turned in our map with about 15 minutes to spare. This is the part where you are supposed to start the Orienteering course. We threw everything down, got the "O" map, located the first point and sprinted for it. We made it back and finished together with about 1 minute to spare and 5 more points added to our score.

We got some mad props for our "never quit" attitude and found out that the hot shots from PA didn't get any of the "O" points which we thought was kind of weird. When we finished they had already showered so they must have thrown in the towel hours ago (not very NORSA'esque).

Pizza, Subways and gatorade awaited us at the finish line (a welcome sight) and we ate ... a lot ... while we talked to Altimeter guy and his partner comparing routes and. The awards followed immediately afterward and though we didn't get top 3 we were still really happy with our day's accomplishments. There was a raffle of sorts as well. Tim scored a $30 floor pump, Mike got trail guide for Uwharrie forest, Adam got a bottle of electrolyte powder and I got another event T-shirt.

We slept well that night and woke up around 8am. We left the campground at 9:30 and made it back to Raleigh by noon. Great trip; awesome adventure. Another one for the NORSA record books."