XPD 2013 Race Report

Bear Hunt is a young team of adventure racers. XPD 2013 was Bear Hunt's inaugural race, but the members have had many outdoor adventures together and raced together in 24hr MTB events. Mike and Max did GeoHalf last year, and Minh-Tam and Charlotte did the most recent one. Mike also participated in XPD 2011 but unfortunately the team did not complete the course.

We started XPD with the simple goal of finishing the full course as a team. In the end we finished the whole course barring the cancelled kayak leg in 6 days (147h 37m) coming 10th overall, and 8th in the mixed teams. In short, we not only achieved our goal but far exceeded our expectations, and are now thoroughly hooked on AR.

The adventure for us began when leaving Canberra on Thursday. We started our road trip in a van borrowed from Minh-Tam’s in-laws, and an ageing trailer kindly lent to us from Mike’s parents. Outside of Hay, NSW, the trouble started - trailer had a tyre blowout, and was replaced with a spare of questionable age and condition. We changed the wheel, drove to Hay and got there just before 5pm. We were able to get a new tyre for the trailer and could continue on our way.

We stayed overnight in Ouyen and left in the morning. Less than 5km outside of Ouyen, we found that the bearings on one of the wheels of the trailer had failed and disintegrated. The wheel just sat loosely on the axle, wobbling about. After calling roadside assist, we were met by a mechanic from Ouyen who thought he could fix the problem, saving us from having to beg/buy/steal a replacement trailer. What followed was a six hour delay, and a couple of hundred dollars in time and parts, to have the bearings repacked, and sealed with similar (but not the correct) size seals and caps, which had to come from Mildura. Team Bear Hunt used this time to go for a run, and to practise pitching our super lightweight tent - just in case that might give us an advantage over other teams in the race, or at least intimidate them at the gear check. We got it down to 1:39min to set up, 48sec to pack up.

We eventually made our way to Adelaide and met up with Max who had flown there in the morning to meet us after lunch. The team then arrived in Port Augusta at about 11:30pm on Friday evening.

Saturday was taken up by portioning of food into ‘snack’ units: during our training hikes we had worked out that we need about one muesli bar or equivalent size snack every 45 minutes. So many kilos of shapes, jelly beans, scroggin, nuts and lots of other things were repackaged into zip-lock bags.

Our race almost ended before it started when a neighbour let us know that she had just seen a kid riding off with Charlotte’s bike. Max and Minh-Tam had a dark chase through the bush before the bike was found and returned by the local police. Lucky!

After all these adventures, race briefing and the ensuing madness of packing crates and marking up maps was all blissfully uneventful. The course looked super exciting - somehow stringing together all the sights of the Flinders ranges into one daunting, epically long course. We got everything all done by 12:30am and went to bed, conscious of the fact that sleep would soon become a luxury.

TUESDAY:

We had an early start to load our gear and hop on the bus to the starting location in Arkaroola. It was a long drive and gave us a chance to preview some of the landscape we’d be travelling through - seemingly inhospitable with flat saltbush plains broken by low rocky ridgelines. It looked hot outside, and felt like we had driven an awful long way from Port Augusta. But there was a palpable air of anticipation--it was now days since we all left work and travelled from Canberra and we still hadn’t started the race!

Arkaroola was a night of luxury and relaxation and a chance to get to know the other teams. We took a dip in the Arkaroola resort pool and caught up with the other Canberra teams. We were handed nice big tents to set up for that night, and were fed a generous and tasty dinner. Still, it was not a rowdy night: start was scheduled for 9am the next morning, but with a 90 minute hike to get to the startline, and we wanted to have time to enjoy our last cooked breakfast until midcamp! How will we get through this? Did we forget anything? Some other teams set about buying fly nets and some of us were considering it too.

LEG 1:

So Wednesday started early and we were very excited. We had our cooked breakfast and wandered up along a ridge to the start line - it was so hot and only 8:30am! We hung about enjoying the view, trying to check out the terrain for the rogaine which was the start of Leg 1, and marvelling at how far it was to lake frome which was just visible on the horizon - We'd be walking / biking there by tonight! A short ceremony was performed for the two team members of the Japanese team who were lost in a kayaking accident earlier in the year, and then we were underway.

We nailed the rogaine through some steep, rocky but sparsely vegetated hills, & managed not to get carried away and run too much. It felt like we had half the field following us from one checkpoint to another which made us feel good about our nav. We needed to collect four of the six controls in the hills, then the rogaine ended with all teams entering the spectacular Arkaroola Creek gorge which we would be following for several km.It was hot! Max sucked on his camelback hose and the water suddenly stopped! We were halfway through the trek, no water drop until transition and it was only 11:30am!

Thankfully we soon hit a waterhole and we felt pretty stupid when Charlotte and Max filled their camelbacks while all the other teams just stopped to dip their hats in the green, murky stagnant water. Half an hour later, when the purification tablets had done their work, we found that the water tasted truly awful, tasting like algae and dirt, and strongly salty. It was impossible to take a sip without an involuntary grimace or retching. But it was water, and was drinkable in a concentrated hydrolyte shot. Later discussions with other teams lead us to believe that some of the later waterholes may have been better options and we should have sampled a few others - but I think we were still better off than the teams who had to fill up from the waterhole with a dead kangaroo on the bank.

Thanks to the heat and rationing of water, Max and Mike were in a pretty bad way by mid afternoon. We gradually slowed down in the heat until the final checkpoint of the leg which was up on a high sunbaked ridge. We trudged up the steep slope - Mike looking particularly bad in the heat. We hit the checkpoint easily, but had to find a patch of shade under a bush for Mike to recover. Unfortunately, stopping in the hot shade seemed to make Max even worse, and when he had us going again he was feeling pretty hot and queasy and ended up vomiting pretty much as soon as we got down the slope. He was pretty unsteady on his feet, and Minh-Tam had to carry his pack for a few kms until the sun went down. Sunset was very welcome, but it was still hot and it signalled that we were running behind our desired timeline! Mike needed frequent rests, and didn't recover until much later that night. We finished the leg after it got dark the last hour of that walk was probably one of the longest. We stumbled into transition, grateful to have reached fresh water. Some cans of coke and rice cream perked us up pretty well.

Thinking back, leg 1 was one of the worst for us, but a lot of other teams fared even worse, and we passed many on the next leg who were resting and trying to recover from severe dehydration and heat-stress. It taught us a lesson about water, and we all carried some excess on all future legs.

LEG 2 :

We took it easy on the mountain bike leg across Wooltana station (on an aside, Max’s grandmother was closely following the race and could remember riding horses through the area with a school friend), using it to recover from the heat and dehydration. The leg started well. We knew where to go and moved at a good pace, but were held up by deep, soft bulldust patches which caused some amusing swerving and crashes. We had a bit of a reconnoiter along a wrong turn which was especially sandy and soft, so we deflated our tyres and kept going. Why didn’t we deflate our tyres before!? This was so much easier! Of course, we then decided 500m later that this was not the right road after all, turned back to the crossing and took the actual correct one. Not a big deal, and we got some improved ride quality and traction out of it. Eventually the track petered out and navigator Max decided we would go cross-country to the dingo-proof fence that ran along the edge of the map. While those five kilometers were hard work, it was fun, and fairly fast moving, we could ride most of the way, only occasionally losing it in deep patches of soft sand which would grab the front wheel and send people over the bars. It kept us awake and laughing. Tubeless tyres paid off here, as we definitely scrunched over a lot of very spiky bushes. We heard many stories of punctures during this race, but luckily we had none. We got to the Dingo Fence- a double fence - the first one tall floppy chicken wire plus barbs, and the second a regular looking fence. Hard to climb over the first, the second looked easy and Max hopped over it no worries. Minh-Tam asked - Is it electric? Max assured everyone it was fine - he had just crossed it! Charlotte coming second got half way and got a big zap. She wasn't happy and the rest of the team crossed very gingerly, trying to leap over without touching it. We were able to fly down the road along the dog fence and get to the TA in good time, making a fairly fast transition to our hiking gear for the trek across the Lake Frome, leaving the TA in 13th place.

LEG 3:

We each carried about 8.5 litres of water for leg 3, as there would be no (drinkable) water on the salt lake. Minimum was 6 litres. We started out at about 2am, after having a short chat with team Outward Bound in the TA. Their plan was to walk around the salt lake until the point where the island with the CP was closest to ‘shore’, then walk across to it. Our plan was to walk straight on a bearing from TA across the lake to the island. There was a little bit of rivalry going on between the Canberra teams and we were very keen to see which of the two plans would work out better. We picked a star that suited our bearing and marched off. Once we had passed the dunes at the shore we walked with our torches turned off. It was beautiful. The salt pan is completely flat, but not smooth, and it felt a little like walking on ice with a thin layer of snow or frost on top (except not slippery). Even though there was no moon, it was bright enough on the white surface that there was no risk of us running into anything, nor was there anything to run into. We learned a few things about salt-lake walking that leg. For one thing, don’t sit down: salty water will immediately soak into one’s clothes and when it dries, the item of clothing will get quite stiff, coated in a sandpapery layer of salt crystals, some of them as large as one millimetre across & causing nasty chafing. I heard that one team slept on the salt lake, I wonder how their sleeping bags look now.

We checked our bearing every fifteen minutes or so and picked new stars as the night progressed. In between, we had a competition to spot the most shooting stars, and found some new constellations. Particularly noteworthy constellations we discovered included “The Snake” “God’s Ear” and most importantly “The Bear”. It was spectacular how many more stars were visible than usual and it was a great way to spend a night.

We witnessed the most amazing sunrise, long, colourful, bright orange over a completely flat and white surface, the orange disk of the sun rising slowly and perfectly, no clouds obscuring it either. After many hours walking our feet started complaining about the hard surface of the lake. We trudged on, now able to see the islands, one of which had our CP on it. Over the next while, what seemed like hours, the islands didn’t seem to get any closer as we walked on towards them. The perspective on the salt lake was messing with us - we continued the interminable trek to an island which looked just a few steps away, taking short breaks on the featureless salt to ease our tender feet, getting thoroughly disheartened by our apparent complete lack of progress. But eventually, we saw that one of the islands was more to our side than ahead of us: we had made it far enough to see our progress! We were then finally able to match the islands to their shapes on the map and trudged on and on and on towards our chosen island, looking forward to being able to walk on soft sand for just a very short time.

Finally we reached the CP and had a few minutes rest, but the flies were very persistent. How did so many flies even get there, there’s nothing on the salt lake for them to eat? And we didn’t carry them in, as we started the trek in the dark, when the flies were all asleep. Plenty followed us back to the “lake” shore, anyway! Maybe the later teams had a few less? (Please comment on this?...). That said, we heard from the volunteers at transition points that they started off the race with very few flies at TAs, and as more teams arrived, more flies took residence at TAs. During this short break at the CP, we were overtaken by another team. No idea where they came from, we thought there was nobody close to us.

We left the island, used Max’s sighting compass to pick out a spot on the horizon in the south to walk towards. For the next four hours we walked in a straight line with our eyes on that “cliff” in the distance. The other team that had passed us while we rested at the CP were a few hundred metres ahead of us. We were puzzled as they stopped in front of us, studied the map for a while and turned around and started walking back the way they had come! What could they possibly have seen in this empty saltlake that made them rethink their route so completely? They must have decided to go to the emergency water supply on the shore. We ignored them, and continued walking along our bearing, staring at the heat haze and mirage on the horizon.  

Gradually the mirage got closer… until it was very very close. Fierce debate ensued - was it a mirage? or actual water? Minh-Tam claimed that it was actual water, and Charlotte was convinced that he was hallucinating and that it must be a mirage. The argument was not settled until we stood next to it and dipped our finger in the saturated salt solution which made up the water of Lake Frome. It was suddenly clear why the other team had turned around. After some discussion (was it deep? would the solid crust of the lake be soft and sticky? etc) Max convinced the team that it would be safe to walk through and not be deep, we’d just need to wash our shoes later! Certainly better than adding 10km to our already long trek...

So we splashed on, and it was good fun, and actually quite a relief for our aching feet. It was amazing - crystal clear water making perfect reflections of the sky. To our left and right the horizon vanished and the reflected clouds merged with the real ones. We felt adventurous and excited, thinking that probably most teams would have gone around. The water was only about 30cm deep but the with the splashing we were wet up to mid-thigh with super-saline water. Eventually, some kilometers later, the water stopped and we were back on dry land (or rather, salt). More trudging, and our wet salty shoes slowly dried and became covered in salt crystals. We set a good pace to make sure we got to TA before the salt crystals gave us blisters, and found some of the media crew waiting for us at the edge of the salt. They had seen us coming and we were excited to learn that we had overtaken a few teams and were now at the pointy end of the field. We also now saw that the “cliff” that we had been aiming for was only sand dunes, the heat haze having made it look like a cliff. Max used our binoculars, which we had packed especially for this leg, to scan the horizon looking for the TA, which turned out to be just 500m away from those trees we had been aiming for. That was lucky. We walked straight up the dunes to it and performed an efficient transition to the mountain bikes for leg 4, taking good care to wipe our feet with wet towels and generously coating them in SportsSlick.

LEG 4:

We left the TA in sixth place, with a lot of other teams looking fairly unwell and with sore feet. We later learned that a number of teams had taken a less direct route through the dunes to TA, giving them nasty blisters as the salt crystalised, and the dark sand absorbed heat causing issues for others. We will definitely be bringing binoculars in the future.

Girls on Top passed us early in the leg, going strong on their bikes. At the first CP in that leg, which we found in the fridge of some shearer’s quarters as promised, we had dinner, and with our bright lights set a beacon for three other teams ahead of us who had missed this CP and had been coming back looking for it. So we were fourth at some point there, for a few minutes, even ahead of Bivouac. We briefly got excited and considered trying to race for a high finish, but were able to keep our cool and stay focused on our goal of finishing. We eventually decided that it was time for our first sleep, and we slept for four hours in our tiny tent, feet poking out the end. We woke up well rested but cold, and packed up and moved on, our wheels sloshing through bulldust, which continued to be challenging. We finished the leg at about 7am, finding ourselves still in touch with some of the top teams and made a quick transition to head out on a long trek with challenging nav. Team Bivouac had been held at this transition for most of the night and as one of their members had pretty bad blisters and another member was recovering from severe dehydrations. Congratulations to them to pulling up strong and coming in second in the race!

Team Outer Edge rolled in to TA just behind us as well, also with blisters from the salt lake.

We made sure to wash our shoes and gaiters at this transition area, as we really did not want to get struck with these kinds of problems down the track. We also continued to apply SportsSlick liberally - it’s like magic! Your feet stay dry and nothing seems to rub.

LEG 5:

We started this trek leg across Angorichna Station at 9:30 at a casual pace, aware of the problems that the heat had caused us on day 1. We took a conservative bearing to the first CP and had no trouble hitting it. Looking at the formidable mountains ahead of us, which we would have to tackle at the hottest part of the day, Max and Mike made a last minute change to the course. We had planned on climbing the hills and following the ridgelines across to the water drop on the other side, in retrospect it seems most teams went that way. Instead, we found a low pass which was almost as direct and would also mean easy walking along the watercourses and probably 100m vertical less climbing. It would also mean much reduced exposure to the heat, as we could walk in the shade of trees on the sides of the gully. What a find! We cruised into the water drop and were over-the-moon to find that in addition to the 10L of water for each team there was 1.5L bottle of Coke! Thanks Craig!! Warm Coke has never tasted this good!

We again took a conservative nav choice and charged along the roadway to a creek junction and followed the creek up to CP 14 on the next ridge. We got there just on sunset which was spectacular.

In our hurry to find the control in daylight, and get a view over the upcoming terrain, we ascended the ridge a little earlier than planned. Michael quickly resolved this once we were on top, and we had the CP in no time.

Worried about navigating the next section in the dark we slowed right down and took a bearing to a major watercourse which would lead us to the next control. Mike was pretty tired and Max, up to that point fuelled largely by the coke from the water drop earlier, was getting tired as well. Charlotte was in charge of navigation here and it all worked spectacularly well. We found the creek bed, and moved along it with a few short breaks. Minh-Tam was consistently snoring within seconds of stopping, and having a hard time remembering where he was when we woke him a minute later to move on. "Huh? oh, where are we? Ah, thats right - at the beach" "No, Minh-Tam - we're in a gravelly river bed in the middle of the night on XPD..." Max was back on nav and guided us up the creek and right onto the CP with impressive speed. We ran into team Mawson who had been stumbling around for hours, fruitlessly looking for the right hilltop. They’d met the local farmer, explored the local landmarks and the racecourse, and had pretty much given up hope of finding this control in the dark. We slowed down to walk with the Mawson guys and keep away the sleepmonsters and late-night blues by having a good chat. Minh-Tam’s speech at this tired stage had become thickly coated in a German accent and Mike was confused by who the European team member was. Team Mawson’s walking gait suggested pretty tender feet - so we are impressed how they managed to power through the rest of the race!

We parted ways from team Mawson when we decided to have a short break. When the tracks weren't as marked, we took a rough bearing to the last control. Somehow we lucked out again and walked right up to it in the dark and the flag was shining at us in the torchlight. No more hard nav decisions and we headed for a big saddle, and then a major bitumen road into Blinman and the transition to Leg 6 on the bikes. We got there at about 2 or 3am, sadly the pub was closed but the public toilets were open. Tired and stumbling we decided to transition to bikes and then sleep just down the road. We were surprised to meet That’s Cray in transition and it was good to catch up on their race so far - it was clear that they were charging through the field after a tough start on day 1. Mawson also made it to this transition and decided to sleep there.

We rolled out of Blinman and slept for two hours until sunrise.

LEG 6:

This leg along the the northern end of the Mawson Trail was a real highlight! We started again at dawn with a fast 15km along bitumen, soon turning off onto some fast technical fire-road. There were some creek crossings, too! We saw team Mawson here again, it looked like their leaders had to double back as the last rider dropped off due to a mechanical, we think. Team Mawson and That’s Cray passed us again a little later when we were having lunch.

The rocky fire trail was eventually replaced by a spectacular fast descent along smooth dirt road with stunning views of the cliffs of Wilpena Pound. It was Saturday, and there were quite a few “normal” people out at the lookouts. We zoomed downhill and reached a narrow gorge and turned off to more bike-only trails as we skirted some rugged mountain ranges. This section was again a challenge due to the heat and lack of shade, and some long uphills. We got quite a bit slower again, eventually had a bit of a rest in the shade of some trees. Thankfully, not long after we got going again we hit some awesome singletrack! Its amazing how these things can turn everyone's mood and condition around - from doing it tough, we were all laughing and enjoying ourselves. Our clever storage solution for our spare tubes -taping them onto the underside of the frame - turned out to be a bit of a disaster on the technical terrain when one of them got sucked into Minh-Tams forks and he almost went over the bars.  He managed to pull off a one wheel trackstand to save it, and we continued on, popping out of the national park to the Wilpena Pound resort caravan park - a very strange feeling! And from there followed a major road to TA, arriving early afternoon. We met That’s Cray in TA and were inspired to make a quick transition so we could join them for a meal after the Wilpena Pound walk before the pub closed! We had five hours to make the 23 km loop and get there just before the pub kitchen closes at 8:30pm.

LEG 7:

We raced in transition as much as we could and tried to walk pretty quickly, but it was still the heat of the afternoon, and 5 hours was too fast for us as a non-running team. The Wilpena Pound trek started with a steep, scrambly climb on hot rocks up to the saddle at St Mary’s Peak, almost at 1000m elevation, affording an amazing view of the bike leg we had just completed. We had ridden from as far as the eye can see! This was one of the best parts of XPD 2013 - we really felt like it was an expedition along the Flinders Ranges and it was always amazing to see how much ground we had covered whenever we got a view.

This was one of our fastest legs, as Charlotte set a cracking pace back down the hill from St Mary’s Peak into the Pound proper. The sun set as we descended into the pound which was beautiful, but unfortunately we got to CP on the lookout after dark. We all had some anti-inflammatories for our feet and were getting quite tired, trying hard to fight off the sleepmonsters with the aid of some NoDoz. Michael saw some faces in trees and bushes! We missed dinner at the pub, but were glad to get off our feet and onto the bikes, and were looking forward to the ropes course.

LEG 8:

Transition back to the bikes for Leg 8 was a little slower than ideal, but still ok. We had to make sure to carry our walking shoes on the bikes this time, as we would need them on the short walk to the ropes course. No roping in bike shoes allowed, presumably because cleats would ruin the equipment.

The 3km walk from where we had to leave the bikes to the climbing wall (The Great Wall in the Moonaries) took forever! We encountered Mawson, on their way back to the bikes from the climb, one of them telling us that the best part would be that you step off the cliff at the top. They looked very tired, but I’m sure we did too! It was dark and we couldn’t see how far we were away from the wall, and it was quite tedious to follow the little pink flags which marked the path. Eventually we all stopped talking, a bad sign. Somebody forced on a conversation and the classification of the Levels of Zombie-fication were invented, although never really hashed out. We were all at Zombie level 3, stumbling mindlessly up the rocky trail to the climbing wall. We met another team coming down the path, and Mike asked them in a joking tone if they had any tips for staying awake. It wasn't until they had finished chatting and had continued on past us that he realised they weren't team "That's Cray", and he didn't know them at all. Still, adventure racing is a friendly sport and it didn't seem to matter to anyone in our delirious state. We did pass That's Cray just before the the top of the agonising climb - they'd lost their control card and were facing a time penalty. We felt bad for them - but it meant we were technically ahead!

We all perked up for the prusik and lower off. Max kept whinging to everyone about how he had wanted it to be an abseil, but in reality it wouldl have been very unwise to let anyone on a rope in our state, a lower-off was a much better option. Lee from That’s Cray later told us he had fallen asleep on the lower... It was fun, but a pity it was dark now that we can see the photos from other teams doing it in the day. All we saw during the climb was a bit of vertical rock wall illuminated by our torches.

The volunteers at the roping station were all very happy and helpful and friendly. It was good to talk to people who weren’t zombies.

The stumble back down to our bikes was one of the major low points of the race. Minh-Tam had reached Level 1 of Zombie-fication (the worst) and who knows what was going on in his head at that point - he probably didn't really know where he was or what he was doing, and kept walking into the back to Michael. Max was almost as bad, and his torch batteries had died and the spares were bottom of the hill with the bikes - clever! Charlotte took the lead finding the path, and Mike took responsibility for getting the two zombies back down.

We made it back to the bikes, and despite feeble sleepy protests from Max and Minh-Tam, we again stuck to our guns regarding sleeping at TA. There were a few teams resting there when we arrived, including That's Cray, but we had decided not to sleep in transition areas as it would be too tempting to stay too long. We were so close to mid camp that we actually intended on pushing on through leg 9 (Biking) to Hawker with no sleep. But Max could not ride in his state, and Minh-Tam was probably not safe either, so a ditch was found a bit further down the road, to get us out of the wind. Just a 20 minute power nap! Mike set the Screaming Meanie, our super-loud alarm. In the sleeping bag, with all our clothes on, and the bag wrapped in the emergency blanket. Sounded like a good idea at the time! Max was out cold right away. Minh-Tam ate some food and then was gone too.

An hour and a half later, the alarm went off and rose Team Bear Hunt from their sleep in the ditch. Clearly setting the alarm when tired isn’t that easy. Minh-Tam was extremely grumpy as he claims he couldn’t feel his left leg from the cold, the rest of the team was freezing too but warmed up once we were all back on the bikes. We were overtaken yet again by That’s Cray as we were peeling off layers.

The dawn light actually made easier what would have been hard in the dark an hour earlier. We needed to cross some fields on some criss-crossing farm tracks that didn’t match the map, and find the road up to the steep and rocky pass. It turned out to be some good hike-a-bike up to that pass. We were able to ride down some of it, but there were some very steep sections that Max attempted, and looked like he almost crashed on.

After we returned to level ground the refreshing effect of the short sleep was beginning to wear off. Tracks were nowhere as marked, so we rode cross country till we found the track we were after and followed it to the first control of that leg at some old ruins. Mike had been navigating since the night before, but was now feeling pretty bad (with a prickly rash on his neck on top of tiredness leaving him with 0% attention to spare for focusing on just riding the bike let alone for nav). Max took back the maps, dealt with some confusion with out-of-bounds areas, and took us to the graded road for the end of the ride, which was amazing - averaging nearly 30km/h along smooth flat roads with a roaring tailwind made for an easy and lightning fast finish into midcamp in Hawker. Max was again out of synch with the rest of the team regarding energy/tired cycles, and was feeling good while the others were struggling and it was lucky that the Midcamp carrot was dangling just ahead of them or we would have had to have another break.

Midcamp however, was like heaven. Aside from all the other good parts of XPD - a major drawcard is how much it makes you appreciate the little things. Stopping. For 6 hrs. Hot cooked breakfast. Oranges from the fridge. A shower. Oranges! Sleep. The words of encouragement from loved ones via trail mail were very welcome! It was very hot though, at midday in Hawker, and sleep was uneasy, even though we all really wanted it.

We did make use of the town to buy an icecream and a gatorade before setting out again on the next leg - Leg 10 the long 155km cycle to Wirrealpa.

LEG 10:

In hindsight we definitely approached this ride the wrong way - we thought we should take it easy but not stop for a sleep. Most other teams did the opposite - they rode hard and may or may not have taken a rest. Either way, we probably needed a sleep, and definitely should have tried to push the pace a bit more.

We set off from Hawker in the late afternoon - at around 4:30, and only just left camp before deciding to buy that ice cream from the local servo. We got going again and the sun began to set. We were loving it - beautiful wide open plains and flat, smooth dirt road - a real highway compared to the farm tracks we started the race on. We rode casually, not pushing ourselves, and kept leapfrogging with another team - passing each other as soon as one team took a break. We found the cemetery in which the first CP of this leg was placed, and Minh-Tam broke through the ground (into a rabbit warren, not a grave) and this time actually went over the bars, landing in a hole immediately next to the tree to which the control point flag was tied. That's a way to find it!

We continued well into the night, feeling pretty good, but began to get tired and worn out and cold as the night progressed into the early hours of the morning. The road started tending up hill to a control at a campsite in Warren Gorge just north of Quorn which is no doubt a great place to visit in daylight. After this we turned downhill towards Arden Vale and the later infamous town of Quorn.

It's worth mentioning at this point - we got cold when we stopped, and got hot as soon as the weather was hot or we were pushing ourselves: we basically had about as much control over the temperature of our worn-out, tired bodies as a lizard. It meant we had to be quite careful about when and how we stopped so that we didn't suffer ill effects from getting too cold.

Riding down from Warren Gorge that night we kept riding through a temperature inversion - every time we rode down hill into a gully the air would become freezing cold and we would start shivering. As we climbed back out, you'd pass through a sudden warm patch and start feeling ok.

Mike and Max were alternating nav, one map each and kept pressing steadily on until Quorn, found the checkpoint at the railway station and then decided that the team needed a break. We we all suffering so we decided on a short powernap. Charlotte found a small alcove in front of the post office, which normally provides a bit of shelter for people checking their PO boxes (or for XPD'ers in the early hours of the morning). We had about a 15 min nap there before moving on. This was probably one of the most comfortable night-time powernaps we had.

Out of Quorn we continued along the Mawson Trail as it climbed up and over a steep mountain range, providing some tough climbing for 3am, and some fun descents after. Max was back on nav for a while, Minh-Tam opening and closing gates that we passed, Mike taking the role of spilling Skittles all over the place while trying to eat some. We kept on until close to transition in Wirrealpa. The terrain had flattened out again, and we were beginning to get some pink tint in the eastern sky and we knew we were only a few kms out of TA. Charlotte was having trouble staying awake on the bike, so we decided it was a good time for another short nap, hoping we would feel fresher when the sun rose. It may or may not have been a good idea to lay our mats and emergency blankets out on the ground - we all woke up a bit cold again and took a while to get going and Minh-Tam put his hand in a prickly bush, pulling out splinters for the next day or so. However when we woke from our 20 min nap the sun was up, Max checked our yellow brick tracking/messenger device and saw that the final kayak had been cancelled. Max was unreasonably disappointed about this, but Mike recognised what it really was - a chance to finish early.

It was a sad little bunch of us that arrived in transition for a welcome sitdown and some food. We found that other teams ahead of us had powered through the bike leg and were now some hours ahead of us, where we had previously been only just behind them. Some had slept once they started the walk - but it became clear we were no longer within reach of the lead group. Keith (a Canberra racer turned volunteer and a very friendly and encouraging face for us since the pre-race dinner in Arkaroola) was around to chat and give us some encouragement to lift our spirits a bit, and remind us how well we really were doing, and we remembered our goal was just to finish - all but assured given the kayak was now cancelled.

LEG 11:

Then the other teams started arriving. We'd been faffing around transition eating and staring at the wall like zombies and then team BAAM!! and Outer Edge arrived looking energized and like they were in race mode. That lit a fire in our pants and we quickly left transition at around 7am and then all but ran to the start of the final hike.

This was the big leg of the race, more daunting than the salt lake, despite largely following trails. 53km including the 1000m peak of Mt Remarkable. We definitely went out too hard at the start of that leg. Mike was not feeling good soon after we started - already struggling with sleep and heat. We passed the first control and descended into some beautiful canyons and gorges called the Terraces in Mt. Remarkable National Park. The trail was pretty rough however, and Mike and Minh-Tam were dangerously close to sleeping as they walked. We soon came to the point of deciding whether we needed to stop and sleep now or continue to a more appropriate place with shade and away from the flies. We decided on the latter and NoDoz came to the rescue. (We ended up not stopping at all - pushing through till TA at around 1:30am the next morning.)

After the canyons we climbed up to some sun-baked 4wd tracks and gradually descended to Mambray Creek and Alligator Gorge. This was also great walking (we passed some school groups out on overnight hikes in this area, which was decidedly a weird feeling - probably on both sides). Finally we had to start the climb back up to the high country, gradually making our way to Mt. Remarkable over many steep ups and downs. It got dark as we crested the first rise out of Mambray Creek. Max navigated all the hike, and was feeling great until a tricky nav checkpoint on a creek junction off of the tracks we had been following. We didn't hit it quite square, and when we found the right creek, we didn't recognise it in the dark and we almost kept going before we sat down, checked the maps and decided to have a better look around. Another team was bearing down on us here, and Max was certain that in our tired state they would easily pass us.

The tracks became indistinct, and the landscape changed from bushland to pasture and farmland albeit incredibly steep and rocky pasture. (Somewhere over the previous night's riding we had left the dry, rocky Flinders Ranges and come to some temperate looking agricultural land and the bush around the Mt. Remarkable National Park was like Canberra or the Blue Mountains, except that the rocks were a deep red.) With Minh-Tam's Ayups we were managing to stick on the correct trails and keep moving in a very sleepy state. Minh-Tam and Mike were again having serious hallucinations - Mike had been seeing faces in every tree, bush and rock since dark, and Minh-Tam getting bad shortly after the checkpoint in the creek, seeing house of horrors type skeletons and masks everywhere. Charlotte was quite cold and tired and had trouble seeing the path. Max seemed to be going strong still, hopped up on NoDoz. Our zombie-like gradual climbing was interrupted by an out of bounds area, crossing the marked path on the ridge we were following at right angle. It was clear that following the track would take us into private land and out of bounds, before the track would then switch back more than 100 metres lower in the hillside, within bounds again. Minh-Tam saw some bent grass and claimed that the right thing to do would be to descend the hillside straight down, along the edge of the out of bounds area, to meet the track again further down in the valley. For Mike, this turned into a toboggan ride on Charlotte’s pack which he had been carrying in addition to his own. It looked like fun but sounded a bit painful. And then, we had to climb up again on the opposite side of the valley. This woke some of us up (particularly Max and Minh-Tam) and just increased the level of discomfort for others (Mike and Charolotte). Max and Minh-Tam guided Mike and Charlotte up the final few pinches to the crest of Mt. Remarkable when the weather became cold and rainy. We were in a cloud! This made our decision for us - Charlotte was already feeling the cold and looking like a completely different person. The icy wind and rain on the summit meant stopping was not an option for us - and besides it was only a 5-6km descent on a marked walking trail down to the TA in Melrose.

Oh god... That descent... Truly the low point of the race. The trail was narrow and rocky along a steep scree slope, a steep drop on the left, a steep rise on our right  - and we were all very unsteady on our feet. Minh-Tam and Charlotte were convinced the trail (which contoured gradually down the steep side of Mt Remarkable) was spiralling down around a cone, and Minh-Tam kept lookng up to see if we had passed a point before, and looking down to see if he could see a shortcut. Of course there was none and we would have been in terrible trouble if any of us had left the path, by our own volition or not. That said, Minh-Tam had revived enough to lead the group down along the formed path. Mike couldn't stop the hallucinations, he tells us that Minh-Tam and Charlotte’s walking poles kept turning into lamp posts and car doors and fences and more than half the things he was seeing were probably not real. Charlotte couldn't see further than the ground between hers and Minh-Tam's feet, stumbling forward following her cone of light in pain from the blisters that had formed on this trek. Time stood still as we walked for what subjectively felt like days and weeks down this horrible steep hill.

Yet somehow we made it down. Minh-Tam claims he knew what the end of the descent would look like, he was experiencing strong deja-vu and believes that he has done this same descent before (he hadn’t!). We ended up in the Melrose caravan park, and then had to find our way out, to the Melrose hall. Not an easy task at 1am, without waking people in the caravan park.

LEG 12:

Then at 1:30 am we made transition... and to our surprise some of Max’s relatives were there waiting for us! It was a lift to his spirits and he woke up a bit, although clearly not enough to look at the maps properly. Poor Mike and Charlotte were completely out of it ,probably would not have remembered seeing Max’s relatives had we not talked about it later. They were really not themselves. We needed a break and a sleep - so we laid out for a 2hr nap. Again our alarm setting skills failed us and we woke many hours later with team Adventure Fit in TA.

Anyway - you may have heard what happened from there - disastrous lack of maps and a detour via Quorn. We knew we had to ride to Port Augusta, we knew the highway was out of bounds. Max had been given an A4 piece of paper with some maps of towns on it, and assumed that was it. When we got out, clearly it wasn’t enough. We made a turn to Quorn instead of towards Stirling North, adding 40km to our 60km final ride, thereby killing off our chances of catching AdventureFit, but allowing us to have milkshakes in Quorn instead!

We made it and we're super stoked with how we went. We aimed to finish and came in the top ten. During the race, we even had the podium in sight, but stuck to a more conservative pace to insure we made it to the finish line.

Sleep would have been our greatest problem. We needed fewer sleeps in bigger doses, as many power naps are not the same as a proper sleep. Navigation by Mike and Max and also by Charlotte and a tiny bit by Minh-Tam was great and aside from the final big stuff-up had very few mistakes. Performance on foot was good, could have been faster at times, was too fast to be sustainable at other times. Performance on the bikes was according to plan, but we had plenty of capacity to go harder on the bikes had we managed the sleep better, would have allowed us to use our strong discipline to our advantage. The bikes performed perfectly.

We carried way too much food, and it’s evident we need to work on our alarm-setting skills.

We’re definitely keen on doing more adventure races as a team, especially expedition-length ones. Balancing time with work will be a challenge, but we have placed ourselves on the waiting list for GodZone, nonetheless. Also very much looking forward to XPD 2015!

We had a bit of help to get to, and through, XPD:

Sea to Summit (www.seatosummit.com.au), NetSpot (www.netspot.com.au) and Pushy's Bike Warehouse (http://www.pushys.com.au/) were very generous and assisted us with some gear.

Annette Zou (http://www.threadless.com/profile/2605239/tobywins) and Meaghan Arundell designed our logo and awesome uniforms.

Caroline Christenson and Moshu Smith are Minh-Tam and Max’s loving partners and thoughts of them helped them through.

We also had our own news anchor on Facebook: Caitlin McCluskey. And Peter Dobos at Breathe Magazine.

And everyone else who posted encouraging messages on Facebook and as trail mail, and who followed Caitlin’s updates about us!

- Team Bear Hunt (#5)