Time to revive the travel blog - can you believe I haven't published a post since 2017?? I won't bore you with details of what I've been up to since then, but in a nutshell... We traveled a fair amount, I went to New York City with Courtney and Andy and I went to Germany with my family to visit Andrew when he was studying abroad (April 2018). In the summer of 2018 we said goodbye to our best friends as they started a new chapter in Colorado Springs (spoiler alert - they moved back!), oh and we did that other major thing where we said some vows and promised to be together forever in September 2018. I actually have an entire unpublished blog about our wedding day that will probably never get published :) Regrettably, I never blogged about our January 2019 honeymoon - 12 days traveling around Costa Rica. I really should get back to that... but we'll see. Anyway didn't I promise not to bore you? I already broke it...
Ouray, Colorado... pronounced YOO-ray or yoo-RAY for all you uncultured, sea level dwellers like myself, is a small town nestled in the heart of the San Juan mountains of south west Colorado. It's just about an hour or so north of Durango on the Million Dollar Highway 550 (more on this later). The Ouray 100 is a 100 mile endurance run in the mountains started by mountain living running enthusiasts with a keen taste for physical punishment. Ouray itself sits at about 7700 ft altitude and the run takes you up past 12,000 ft (and back down...) repeatedly for 100 miles - one time even going above 13,000 ft. There are whole documentaries about this race that are definitely worth a watch, because while I may be snarky on here, it's really impressive what the human body is capable of. My dad has been training for this harder than I can even begin to understand, let alone describe to you. I'm grateful for the incredible group of people surrounding him though - the love and support within the Ultra community never ceases amaze me.
The entire crew in Ouray! Including five runners (my mom and brother included) prepared to tackle anywhere between 5 and 20+ mountain miles to keep my dad on pace
The crew at home!! You guys rock.
And the cutest runner of all! Gordon the Husky :)
Ready to go at bib pick up!
Wondering what's with the shirts? Hehe. Crew member, pacer, ultra running badass y mi hermana, Diana, designed them to feature all dad's favorite things: telling everyone to "chop chop" and mountains made out of fried chicken 😅 Also shout out to Adam for turning her vision into a reality and getting us the coolest team shirts ever.
After a group dinner at Outlaw Restaurant, we settled in for an early night before the race started at 8am the next morning. The starting line was chilly and full of nerves, excitement, well wishes and nervous good byes from loved ones. Dad had a GPS tracker provided by the race that was supposed to go live on the Ouray 100 website so we could see where he was. After seeing him off, the group split up for a few different planned activities. See, Dad had to accomplish the first 50 miles by himself before he could have any pacers with him. That means that the first pacer wouldn't leave with him until about 7am on Saturday morning - so almost 24hrs from the current time. In fact, crew wasn't even allowed at ANY of the aid stations until mile 27, so about 11 hours from now at dad's planned pace. So we had a lot of time to kill.
Mom, Andrew, Julianne and I head for breakfast at Camp Bell's Cajun Cuisine (yeah, I couldn't tell it a breakfast place from the name either, ha). We had some bangin breakfast burritos smothered in green chili (a staple for me in Colorado) and Andrew got veggie eggs benedict - also very good. From there we took off to hike Box Canyon. The rest of the crew (Diana, Andres, little Andresito, Terry and Kristi) went to Silverton, which is a nearby tourist town with mine tours and a scenic train ride.
View of from Fellin Park - where the start and finish of Ouray 100 are - only about a 3-4 min walk from our Airbnb
Views from the very easy walk into the canyon!
Box Canyon Waterfall!
96 stairs up to a bridge affords you this spectacular view
Picked up the Perimeter trail - found some spots that dad already ran through!
This was right after Julianne narrowly evaded a rude fly attack
Box Canyon hollywood-style sign in the mountains 😍 after much debate as to why it was spelled "Box Canon" we determined it was actually in Spanish. But why couldn't they be bothered to include the tilde in the ñ ?? Surely that is within the realm of sign technology, lol.
After getting sufficiently roasted by the Colorado sun, we head back to the Airbnb to clean up and wait for our cousin Chris to arrive. Chris lives in Durango and we haven't seen him since my wedding, so it was nice to catch up. We also notice that Dad's GPS is still not active... at this point we're starting to get annoyed, so mom emails the race director who puts out an alert to the aid station captains to try to get Dad a working tracker. We head out for an early dinner at Ouray Brewery, and here is where we have some of the best food we'll have the entire trip - oh man. The Cluck Norris chicken sandwich is such a winner, haha. And the summer saison is up there with some of the best beers I've had. We make a note that we'll definitely be coming back here later to drink on the rooftop deck.
Here is where things start to go a little south (ok that's an understatement). Dad's GPS still isn't working - it's about 6pm and we head to the mile 27 aid station at Ironton. We expect him to arrive there at 7pm. It's only about an 8 mile drive down Million Dollar Highway, but the rain has really picked up by this point. I should mention it had been raining off and on since 1pm. We're heading on down the highway and we noticed water coming off the cliff face. At first it's super cool - like wow - there are literally waterfalls spilling onto the highway. Julianne starts a video of them. I'm already a pretty anxious passenger, so I'm in the front seat hands sweating and turning white from the rain, the switchbacks, cliff edge and lack of safety barrier. Then out of seemingly no where, a rock crashed through our sunroof showering us with glass - thank goodness for safety glass - no one got hurt - and mom held the wheel super steady, didn't even flinch even though I'm pretty sure the rock ended up in her lap. Didn't stop me from having about 13 panic attacks in the next hour and a half or so.
Here's the video - watch it with the sound on. My face is absolutely priceless in this moment of sheer terror and panic.
When we arrive at the Ironton aid station and we park where we see runners come in. It's still raining really hard - so we gear up with our rain jackets and start trying to clean the glass out of the car. Turns out mom was sitting on a whole pile of it (again, thank goodness for safety glass) and there was also quite a bit on Julianne's seat right behind the driver side. Then we take a poncho that we had in Dad's bag and cover the hole on the outside and hold it down by shutting it in opposite side doors. Then we wait... and worry.
We leave the car and walk over to the aid station tent and let them know once again that Dad's GPS tracker hasn't worked all day. They reassure us that they have a new one for him. Ok.
It's really raining, so we sit in the car and watch runners come in. 7pm comes and goes. Surely the other group would be here by now? Diana and Terry would never miss an aid station meet up. More worry.
Photo Julianne took from Ironton Aid station. When you are above 11,000 ft, you're above the tree line and susceptible to being struck by lighting. Ironton is at 9,800 ft. But remember what I said before about how high Dad was climbing during this race? If lightning is striking near you, you want to crotch down, cover your ears and touch your heels together to direct the current through your feet and not have it go through the ground and exit somewhere else in your body. In dad's case, he also needed to make sure he tossed his metal hiking poles a distance away from him as well.
It was right around 7 that Andrew noticed an emergency vehicle parked at the aid station tent area that wasn't there before. He hopped out of the car to see what was going on... that is when we learned about the mudslide. The only reasonable explanation as to why our group wasn't all at the aid station by now is that they are trapped on the other side of the mudslide... see the map below.
Ok so here you can see Ouray to the north (yellow box) and Silverton to the south (purple box) with Ironton right in the middle. We drove south from Ouray and that's where we got hit by the rock. Our friends were driving north from Silverton and that's when they got trapped by the mudslide that took out the entirety of highway 550 (Million Dollar Highway) for an undetermined amount of time. The officer from the emergency vehicle told Andrew that it would likely be all night.
So now we have a leaky van held together with a poncho and no crew. No cell service of course. Mild panic is setting in when out of now where an aid station attendant approaches our car and is like your runner is looking for you!! What?! we were watching the runners! ugh. Apparently there were two approaches to the aid station (depending on what part of the course you're on) and we were at the wrong one. Dad came over to us equipped with a new tracker and ready to change and go - he beat the cutoff time for mile 27 by 30 minutes. Mom let him know everything that had gone wrong - at this point we didn't know if his pacers would make it back from the other side of the mud any time soon. There was no other reasonable* (*cliff note for later) alternate route so we assumed they had gotten a room in Durango for the night and would check in with us when they had cell service there. Our cousin, Chris, was stranded on our side of the the mud and had a 3.5hr drive ahead of him on the only alternate route which takes you through Telluride.
I should note that if Dad had continued on at this point, he would return to Ironton at approximately 10:30 pm and then again at 2am. The original plan was to drive back and forth from Ouray for each meet time - but just thinking about making that drive again in the dark was enough to send me spiraling. My mom very calmly and frankly asked him to stop the race at this point for his safety and for the crew's safety. This was a gut wrenching decision that wasn't taken lightly at all. There are enough what if's (both good and bad) to keep you up all night.
Then right at this point, we hear that they're going to start the process of cleaning the mud off the highway. Chris is able to go home the normal route and we get in the car and head back to Ouray. Would you believe that the rain had only stopped for about an hour at this point and the crazy waterfalls coming off the cliff had already stopped. Alarmingly, there were several large rocks in the road as well... we were fortunate that the one that hit us was just a little guy.
The culprit!
If you watched the video above you can see that when it first comes through, it's only a small hole... as we drove, more and more glass cracked off. Eventually we had to hammer out the entire section of the roof and clean out all the glass.
Hard at work! Two GARAGE SALE signs, two NO TRESPASSING signs and two FOR SALE signs... and a whole roll of tape!
A work of art - all patched up for its 1300 mile trip home!
The MUD!! Diana tried to walk across it, lol. The police officer informed her that she would get a ticket for trying that. A mud-walking ticket! Only in Colorado... haha. You also gotta hear Terry tell this story too, because apparently there was a very large angry man yelling at the police officer during this whole mud debacle, and at one point he turns his attention to Terry and Diana to just be like IT'S YOO-RAY!! NOT OO-RAY! 😂 Tomato, to-mah-toe, sir
I love Kristi in this video, haha. "We'll be outta here in an hour!" Diana says it was two ;)
Back at the airbnb, Dad is in bed and the four of us have heavy pours of wine while we fret about the others. Soon after we hear from Chris letting us know he made it home safely, which makes us very relieved, but how is that possible that he's all the way in Durango already? Where are our friends?? Finally Kristi gets some cell service and lets us know they're about 15 min out and we exhale and take inventory of the alcohol to see if we have enough for everyone, haha.
When they arrive, we cry and exchange long hugs and share our harrowing stories of how the Colorado mountains tested us today. We found out that they had planned to make the 5.5 hour trip down and around through Durango and back up through Telluride and into Ouray* (there's that cliff note, haha) in order to be able to pace Dad the next day. Luckily, after they had turned around, they saw front loaders heading in the opposite direction back towards the mud. They weren't too far out yet, so they made the gamble to turn around once again and hope the road would reopen tonight. Thankfully it did! They arrived in Ironton and found out from the aid station captain that Dad had removed himself from the race citing "too many things are wrong". Believing that he was injured, they hustled back to Ouray and heard about what we went through on our end. Thankfully no one was injured in all this - I'm sure a few of us have some new gray hairs though.
Well that's a lot of talk about crew misadventures and not much about the guy who did 27 miles on the Colorado mountains. The course was hard - as expected, but conditions made it more challenging. It had been raining on him for about 6 hours, including quarter inch hail. I won't speculate about how he was faring or if he would have finished - that isn't my place - but what I do know for sure is that his heart was in it and he's one of the toughest people I know both physically and mentally. Andrew and I already have a better crewing game plan for if we return to Ouray. We will plan to camp at Ironton and make sure we get up there before the weather turns. The later aid stations are closer - some at Fellin park which is the 3 min walk from the Airbnb like I mentioned.
Ouray 100 mile had a 36% finish rate this year - 94 starters and 34 finishers. My sincerest congratulations to the finishers but to also all 94 starters. You went where most don't dare go - I can't imagine how many times you've been called crazy or insane by coworkers, friends, family who simply don't understand. Who guffaw when you tell them you only sleep for 15 minutes in 48 hours of running... whatever drives you to run 100 miles, it's wildly impressive to me. I've run a flat road marathon and it was one of the hardest things I've ever done 😂 But I love being in the ultra running environment, I love crewing and I love seeing the support systems and crews all around us taking care of their runner. I had the chance to pace Dad at Cruel Jewel 100 from miles 80-86 (roughly) and it was such a great experience. I hope to do it again some day.
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