Today marks day eight of Primal Quest Montana and though the top teams have finished, over 40 teams continue to make their way to the finish line at various speeds.  Slower teams contend with a hard cutoff — make it to the ropes section by 6am tomorrow, or be short-coursed/unofficial.  Mother Nature has a few curveballs left for the weary contenders though — the ropes are currently shut down due to thunder and lightning, which will make the cutoff more challenging as teams already on site form a bottleneck as they wait.  Teams eCountryLifestyle.com, Brunton, and Pedales Adventure are rushing to depart CP23 to make it from Bozeman to the climb site back up the Gallatin River.

Team Dancing Pandas (So-called because they are “Cute, Cuddly, but don’t mess with them or we will @!@# you up”) awaits the MindQuest Rappel segment.

Currently, Dancing Pandas and Blue are waiting to get on the rappel section, as several other teams strategize to finish the rappel, freeclimb, and orienteering sections before the final push to Lake Ennis and back to the finish line.  The Dancing Pandas cited the Crazies as their favorite segment so far and agreed that the race has been one of the best they’ve ever done. 

Team Dirty Avocados II rappels down rock face just prior to a Thunderstorm’s arrival.

Team Extreme Couture, when they found out about DART-nuun’s finished, reminisced about another race they had competed together in.  Apparently, while kayaking Lake Mead, DART-nuun’s kayak actually broke. Instead of throwing in the towel, they pulled over to the side of the lake and portaged the kayak cross country (and this was some rough country) back to the TA for a second go with a functioning kayak.  Amazingly, they still won that race! Kudos to DART-nuun for that finish and their 4th place finish here.

Racers continue to trickle in while the ones still on the course are racing to complete the full route by 3pm Wednesday.  Some will freeclimb, rappel, and orienteer overnight, hoping to set out on the trek early to beat the clock.  These teams have trekked over countless mountains and covered hundreds of miles already on foot.  They are beaten, battered, and blistered, but most are very excited to be on the final leg of the race. 

This just in: a Grizzly sighting has been reported as a team left CP29 in the Spanish Creek section of the MYTOPO.com trekking segment to Ennis Lake.  All teams will be advised and as always, Bear Spray is mandatory equipment for each team member.

Stay tuned for continued adventure…

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Primal Quest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.