24 Hours in the Bush

This past weekend, we did a 24-hour rogaine in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia. We did a short 4 hour rogaine before in Victor Harbour, but for those of you who don't remember, rogaine stands for Rugged Outdoor Group Activity Involving Navigation and Endurance. It is essentially orienteering on steroids and has nothing to do with the similarly-named hair product. Typical rogaines last for either 12 or 24 hours, and always involve navigating at night. This was a 24-hour rogaine, from 4pm Saturday to 4pm Sunday in the central Flinders, just north of Wilpena Pound. We’re heading into fall here in Australia, which means that the dry summer has yielded to a cooler and wetter autumn. The thin green carpet covering the hills, the sideways orientation of plants in creek beds, and signs warning of water on the road provided ample evidence of recent rainfall in the area. It was our first time to this part of the Flinders, but others mentioned they had never seen the Flinders as green and lush as this, and indeed, it was stunning to see the red rock cliffs abutting the green landscape below.

The goal in a rogaine is to navigate your way to as many controls as possible. You are given a map with the locations of the controls, which have varying point values, ranging from 20 to 90 points each. Teams get the maps 3 hours beforehand in order to make a flight plan appropriate to the speed and skill of the team. The idea is to get the highest amount of points by visiting as many controls, and the highest valued controls, in the 24 hour period. Additionally, there is a hash house and a soup kitchen, which provide food and warmth for competitors during and after the event. Some teams decide to stay out all 24 hours, perhaps making a quick stop at the soup kitchen for some nourishment at 0-dark-thirty in the morning, while others make their way back to the hash house for dinner, a few hours sleep, and breakfast before heading out again at dawn.

As this was our first 24 hour bush event, we thought it might be a good idea to head in for dinner and a sleep around midnight, and then head out again around 4 or 5 in the morning to stay out for the remainder of the event. With our flight plan lodged with the course directors, we headed off at 4pm accompanied by just the slightest drizzle. We immediately found ourselves in a creek bed – an excellent place to locate rock outcrops. Having spent nearly two weeks in the southern Flinders doing geological mapping in early April (blog post coming soon), we were tempted to abandon our navigation, and start looking at the rocks. Fortunately, we resisted, and headed up the hill to our first control. (The geology here is really cool, but I will let Dave tell you more about that in a later post.)

Things were really going smoothly. The late evening light was beautiful, kangaroos and wallabies hopped occasionally ahead of us, and we had made it to three controls as the sun started to set. We looked at our game plan, and realized we were more than two hours ahead of our plan, so decided we would add an additional loop. We made it to a control on top of a hill just after we lost the light, and got ready to navigate in the dark. Usually rogaines are held with a full moon, but there was only a half moon, which was often partially obscured by clouds.

Despite the relative lack of light, we were navigating reasonably well in the dark without our headlamps, letting our eyes adjust to the dark, taking compass bearings and using distinguishable features like hills and streams to figure out where we were. We had even devised a way to avoid walking through the enormous golden orb spider webs that seemed to stretch between nearly every tree and bush. Dave would walk with a stick held out in front of him (he sort of looked like a tour guide holding up an umbrella for people to follow), and if the stick met stretchy resistance, he would back up and we would go around another way. I followed behind. This mostly worked, except once when he must have been carrying the stick a bit low, because I suddenly felt a spider web on my head. Fortunately, after shrieking , jumping backwards, and frantically brushing myself off, I realized there were no spiders on me. Phew. You’re probably thinking I’m a major wimp, but you should see these spiders. Some of them are at least as big as your fist, with their legs extending out further. They’re the closest thing to Shelob that I ever want to encounter in real life, that’s for sure. Fortunately, their webs are so strong, that when you walk into them, they stretch, and if you just walk backwards, they don’t stick to you.

Dave and I actually had a discussion about these spiders and their webs before the Rogaine, and we decided that surely the spiders must go somewhere warm at night, and leave their webs. During the pre-event brief, the course directors warned us about the spiders, and what to do if we got one on us since they don't actually leave the webs at night. The directors suggested staying calm and having our partner flick the spider off – we should be OK, they said, because they were pretty sure the spiders weren’t poisonous. Not terribly comforting advice, but I was glad to know I wasn’t the only one concerned about walking into a spider web.

Anyways, apart from the web encounter, things were really going well, so we decided we’d go for a few more controls and get to the soup kitchen just after it opened at 9pm. We planned to head back to the hash house/campground after that for some sleep, figuring we’d get there around 1 am or so.

I’m not sure I can really say what happened during those next few hours because we didn’t make it to the soup kitchen until midnight. And, by the time we got there, I had a blister on one foot, with a second developing on the other. We had some warm pumpkin soup, bread and cake, and then reluctantly left the soup kitchen to make our journey back to the hash house. Things went rapidly downhill after that. My feet, and the blisters in particular, were really starting to hurt. We found one more control, and then I was suddenly overcome with extreme exhaustion. All I wanted to do was lie down – it really didn’t matter where. My eyes were closing as we were walking, and I was just hanging on to Dave hoping to avoid falling over. Turns out, we were about 13 or 14 miles from camp, and we ended up getting back at 5:30am. Thank goodness we didn’t realize how far away we were at the time, because I definitely would have stopped and taken a nap right there in the bush. Oh gosh.

There were a few positive parts of the evening, which I’ll recount here, but I’m currently trying to forget the rest of that never-ending walk, and so won’t share any of the unpleasant details. It turns out that there was a meteor shower, so on the way home, we saw several 'shooting stars'. Fortunately, we were walking in the direction that pointed us to the part of the sky where the meteors were, which was excellent. The stars were also good. It wasn’t too cold, we didn’t walk into any spider webs, we didn’t get lost, and the moon didn’t set until 4am, so we only had to walk in complete darkness for about 1.5 hours. When we got back to the hash house, they still had some hot food. So, after eating some pasta Bolognese, we headed straight for the tent. I was so tired, I fell asleep immediately, completely unaware of the hard ground, and slept until 10:30am.

We ended up not going out the next day to look for controls (I was not really keen to put my shoes back on with blisters), so we instead enjoyed the campsite, read, took a little walk, and waited for the rest of the competitors to return for the finish. We even helped the admin team at the end, noting the time teams finished, and having them add up their scorecards before turning them in to the scorers.

To give you an idea of what’s possible in these events, the top team made it to every single control and finished with 40 minutes to spare. Without measuring, it’s safe to say that they covered at least 100kms, probably running most, if not all of the time. After all of that, they cleaned up a bit, had a bite to eat, and drove 5 hours back to Adelaide for an early flight the next morning. They were in a league of their own and are in fact the current national rogaining champions. However, a number of teams ran a fair portion, and many more actually stayed out for the whole night (we realized that if we had been thinking a little more clearly, we probably should have rested for a few hours at the soup kitchen, and then stayed out the rest of the time, rather than trying to make it back to the hash house.)

Our outcome was a little bit disappointing (though we were the top American finishers!), but the good news is we’re excited to try another rogaine, and to actually stick to our plan this time. And, we got to spend the weekend in the Flinders, which is never a bad thing. It is a magical place, and I do hope we’ll have a chance to get back there again before we leave. (We've posted a few more photos here, if you're interested.)