FEATURED POST

Dunes

Expedition-length adventure races tend to leave competitors with gifts that keep on giving long after the kayak paddles are packed away and the sleep deprivation is counterbalanced by long nights of hibernation-worthy slumber. The gifts might be crater-wide heel blisters that take weeks to heal, or poison oak bubbles in places where Calamine doesn’t belong, or toenails that turn four shades of purple before sloughing off. Such things are almost unavoidable for racers who put their bodies through hundreds of miles of wilderness racing for five, or eight, or even ten consecutive days.

The members of team Yankee Scribes returned from the Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge on December 17 with their own gifts that kept on giving right through the holidays—an odd assortment of wrist tendinitis, toe blisters, and lips so parched by the arid desert sun that one teammate considered sutures to close the cracks.

But no memory from ADAC will last longer than the mesmerizing beauty of the two days we spent trekking across a corner of the Arabian Desert’s Empty Quarter. Moving almost continuously for 40 hours, we crossed nearly 60 miles of rolling—and occasionally soaring—dunes, passing only two “roads” and spotting not a single settlement, man-made structure, or other sign of habitation. A few earth-moving trucks, perhaps, and several incongruous cell towers, but there’s no place on earth (that we’ve encountered) less hospitable to survival. Even the farthest, coldest reaches of Arctic tundra yield water and plant life. Here, nothing, just a few thorny creosotes and the odd clutch of dessicated grass.

The glued gaiter/shoe get-up

Of course, the utter absence of orthodox beauty is part of the desert’s attraction. There’s no sound, save the wind and an occasional diesel rumble—think faraway train at low throttle—that emanates from billions of grains of sand sliding down the steep slopes of the highest dunes. There’s no color but the dun tan of soldier khaki—except at dawn and dusk, when the austere sameness transforms into a terrestrial version of the aurora borealis: shape-shifting oranges and pinks and soft reds playing in waves along the crests and hollows of the dunes. At these moments, you can understand why writers have long used nautical and sexual imagery to describe the scene: There’s a languid, liquid camber to every dune—long curves bending abruptly into rippled buttresses and sinuous waves, like the sweep of a lover’s back spreading into a gracefully turned thigh or shadowed hip.

We finished 36th out of 50 teams, a respectable showing given our ambitions, our efforts to capture good reporting while racing, and the limitations of training around families and full-time jobs. We had low times, to be sure; Adam called them “learning” moments—like the challenge of navigating in utter darkness through dunes that constantly morph in shape and position, using “maps” that were really 1:65,000 satellite photos taken long enough ago that neither of the two roads appeared on them. Like trying to sleep at a mandatory desert stop while a severely dehydrated racer in the next tent puked his guts out. Like running out of water two miles short of the hottest checkpoint on the route.

But mostly there were moments of grace that will last a long time. Discovering a wild camel track at 4 a.m. that gave us a fast, hard-packed course to follow for two hours. Glissading a slope that made music with every footfall. Finding an extra tin of sardines in the food bag. And, weeks later, taking out our desert shoes on New Year’s Eve for a trail run in a foot of fresh Flatirons powder, and watching a shower of ultrafine sand shake off of them. They say the desert—the true desert—never leaves you, and I’m thinking there’s more than one truth to that.

Jon’s Postscript: In the dunes, where just a teaspoon of sand in your shoes can wreck a race—think massive blisters—the team wore Salomon XT Wings with knee-high Outdoor Research gaiters glued to them. They worked perfectly—thanks OR!—and as I discovered on New Year’s, they’re ideal for Colorado powder runs, too.

For more on the race, check out Jon’s interview with Breathe Magazine.