Yesterday Renae and I decided to go walk/run Powderhorn's 10K trail to see what it is like. Man am I glad we did. Because there are a lot of things on race day that I will do differently than what I did today. According to the Powderhorn website there will be one aide station at the beginning/end of Moon Loop. We took 1 liter of water each and I packed my GU Strawberry/Banana Gel and my Hammergel Rasberry to try them out having never used gels before.
The trail race starts at the back of the Sunset Grill. You head beneath the lift between the ski patrol building and several other out buildings down a gravel/dirt road. You'll pass hole number 4 for disc golf (this will be important for the trip back) and on the right hand side is the sign for Powderhorn Hiking Trails. Hook a right down a weedeated trail. This part of the trail isn't to bad. Shortly before 3/4 of a mile you'll come to your first three stream crossings. The first two have rotted tree bases to cross see above picture, they are very giving and probably won't last if there are more than 25 people on race day. The third crossing is more of a hop over make sure you have solid footing on landing.
We meandered through various open fields with wild flowers. During this part of the trail there were various iron ore rocks, lava looking rocks and just plain rocks, not to mention little oak brush roots that would trip you up. On race day I've decided to tape my shoe laces because they kept getting caught on roots. Soon you come to a switchback in which you start descending through an aspen grove. I made a mental note about how much elevation we lost because on the way back we'd have to gain it again. After about two miles we came to the Rock Garden loop which we don't take and headed just a few 100 yards for the Moon Loop. This is where I am guessing the aide station will be. There are a total of I believe 6 creek/stream crossings on this loop which you either plow right through the water or hop across on the loose rocks. I was wearing my nike plus monitor and wasn't sure how waterproof it was so didn't plow right through as I normally might have. During this loop after an hour of hiking I tried my GU gel. It tasted pretty good but took lots of water to accompany it, water I didn't necessarily have (which I actually ran out of around mile 4). Anyway I wasn't sure if I was supposed to feel some surge of energy, but I really didn't feel much.
Once we finished the loop we hooked an immediate right onto the Beaver Creek trail. And after a short bit we saw the beaver damn, it was pretty cool. I decided that I wished I had gators because I kept getting the little grass stickers in my socks and had to pull them out. Around 3.84 miles my ass started dragging, this was about the same time I ran out of water, and also about the same time we started regaining all the elevation we lost. Renae ran out of water around mile 4.3 because I helped her I think. On the beaver creek trail there are 3 or 4 water crossings but there are solid bridges (like VOC bridges) for crossing. It was around 4.8 miles or so that we came back to the gravel/dirt road that brought us down to the trail. For the race the return is not on the gravel/dirt road but up to hole 4 and reversing from 4 to 1 and down to the Sunset Grill. But seeing as I thought I was going to die and we were out of water we headed back to the jeep in the parking lot.
I had both the GPS and my Nike Plus. The GPS indicated we did 5.35 miles with a moving time of 2hours24min and a stopped time of 13min48seconds, max elevation was 9326 and total ascent was 770 feet. My Nike plus indicated we did 5.12 miles in 2hours39min. I tend to rely more on the GPS on this type of terrain. We didn't run any of the trail because we wanted to get a sense of what it was like. I've been on a lot of trails, and am in ok physical shape and this is one of the harder trails just for the fact that there are things that can trip you up pretty much the whole entire trail. We are going back out next Sunday to rerun the trail, perhaps even running some of it, in the early morning (we started our hike at nearly 1pm and it was almost 80 degrees (which I believe is why we ran out of water). We will definitely have more water with us next time.
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