Mesa County ARES has again been asked to provide race communications for the upcoming Desert Rats and Fruita AdventureFest events near Grand Junction. We have worked with Gemini Adventures to relay safety and administrative traffic for three years, and this year, the organizers have joined forces with the UTMB World Series group to add an additional 100K race to kick off the season. UTMB hosts 34 world-wide events and is considered the premier racing series in the running world.
I’ll go over all the events in detail at our meeting on February 25th, but here’s a summary:
Desert Rats
The Desert Rats adventure will on April 14-16, 2023. The first event will be the 100K race on Friday, April 14th. Runners will leave the starting gate at 0700, and the race cutoff will be 20 hours later. The course starts at the Hawkeye Trailhead and continues west into Utah before turning around and coming back to Hawkeye. This will require at least two communication shifts to cover 5 aid stations and start/finish. This is a new race, so we’re not familiar with all of the aid stations and checkpoints. Several of us have scouted the route, so we have a good idea of the course and the GPS coordinates. A couple of the aid stations are in challenging locations (4WD and/or ATV’s) but our reconnaissance so far indicates that radio coverage will be fairly straightforward.
Our big challenge this year is the 100K race. Once the racers leave the Hawkeye Trailhead, they will continue east past TroyBuilt, through Rabbit Valley and on to the Turnaround aid station, where they will head back to start/finish. Repeater coverage will be questionable, so we will need to consider HF voice and any digital modes we would like to try as well as UHF/VHF. This will serve as an excellent test of our emergency communication abilities. In a region-wide crisis, these are areas where we would likely need to set up comms. Since this is a UTMB event, there will be participants from all over the world, some of whom won’t be acclimatized to our high, dry conditions so the ability to relay medical traffic will be critical. If we can’t provide adequate staffing for all of these races, I may need to ask for mutual assistance from other ARES districts, but I believe we can handle it with our friends from the Montrose and Delta areas. If you know a ham who is on the fence about participating in emergency comms, this might be the event to get them involved.
Saturday, April 15th will bring the 50K and 42K (marathon) races. We’ve worked these courses in past years, so we have experience setting up the aid stations. Desert Rats concludes on Sunday, April 16th with a 21K half-marathon and a 10K race.
Fruita AdventureFest
Fruita AdventureFest will take place May 6 and 7 and will be roughly the same as past years. There will be the Fruita Half-Marathon running race and the Sarlacc Attack mountain bike race, but this year they will add a 50K Dirty Edge Gravel race. Sarlacc Attack will be on Saturday, May 6th and will follow the same course as last year with start/finish, Goal Gulch, Sarlacc and Mesa aid stations. The Half-Marathon (May 7th) will still have the Western, Frontside and Chute & Ladders stations. The new addition, Dirty Edge Gravel races (also on the 7th) will also use Sarlacc aid station and the 16 Road aid station.
This year, I have asked for volunteers to act as Comm Unit Leaders for each event. Randy Stringer will be acting as the communication coordinator for Desert Rats, and Bill Ritchen will handle Fruita AdventureFest. We’ll be using the ICS model to get some practical experience setting up the races, so we need some of you who have previously worked these events and know the terrain to help us write up incident action plans using ICS forms and practices. If you have taken ICS-300 and/or AuxComm, you should have all the knowledge needed to write the 201 and 205’s. This is going to be fun!