TR - Escape from LA

[huckbucket]

So cool. Huge stats! Congrats.

[Dantheman]

I don't care that your DFL, I'm fucking dead after 4k of climbing, can't imagine almost 10.

I've done some 10k days so I can imagine that. What I can't imagine is doing it for days on end with just a few hours of sleep each night. Completely, utterly bonkers.

Huge congrats, Evdog! Thanks for taking the time to share the adventure.

[joetron]

Damn. I feel like I just finished reading the LOTR books. That was a radical journey!


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[toast2266]

Super impressive.

Also, the winner's stats are just insane. 308 miles and 44k climbing in 49.5 hours? I can't even really comprehend that. They're basically climbing and descending 1000 ft / hour for 2 days straight.

[evdog]

Yeah, doing that in 2 days is unreal. To simplify the math, that is 22k feet of vert two days in a row. Those guys are pretty much olympic level athletes.

[supermodel159]

The TR was amazing. What blows my mind was the general approachable condition of the trails in your photos. I live just north in Santa Barbara, and a few of our front country trails still remain closed from winter rain damage from last (rain) year. Our backcountry trails in the LP don't look anywhere near as groomed or maintained as what you experienced.

Thanks for sharing.

[Dantheman]

Super impressive.

Also, the winner's stats are just insane. 308 miles and 44k climbing in 49.5 hours? I can't even really comprehend that. They're basically climbing and descending 1000 ft / hour for 2 days straight.

Yeah, doing that in 2 days is unreal. To simplify the math, that is 22k feet of vert two days in a row. Those guys are pretty much olympic level athletes.

Some days I'm convinced that we live in an actual Men in Black-type world with aliens living amongst us.

[evdog]

The TR was amazing. What blows my mind was the general approachable condition of the trails in your photos. I live just north in Santa Barbara, and a few of our front country trails still remain closed from winter rain damage from last (rain) year. Our backcountry trails in the LP don't look anywhere near as groomed or maintained as what you experienced.

Thanks for sharing.

There are definitely trails around that are in terrible shape following last winter. And a few of those made it into the route. But trail condition is something that Gregg and Jason would have considered when designing the route so where they had a choice, they would have picked trails that were in better shape. I'd also say that most of the Escape LA route from Santa Clarita to the beach and even Backbone are what I'd consider front country trails. At least, they are fairly accessible and see regular or heavy use, so they probably see more maintenance as a result. And I'm sure in some places users just rode the trails back into shape. I don't think these areas received anywhere near the amount of rain Santa Barbara did in any of the storms last winter.

The amount of rain Santa Barbara mountains got in those storms was pretty unreal, like 24" in 24 hours. As I understand there was a lot of damage across the whole Los Padres forest. It's disappointing some of the trails are still closed but it takes time to re-open them.

FWIW, the Condor Peak Trail in the San Gabriels was wiped off the map in the 2009 Station Fire and following winter's storms, as were others like Strawberry Peak, Ken Burton, and parts of the Gabrielino trail. The areas those trails are in were closed for many years while they stabilized before trail groups were allowed to start work. And each project took a year or two. Lowelifes just spent 2 years on Condor Peak, finally opening it in 2022. And now they're working on trails damaged in the 2020 Bobcat fire. During those rebuilds a lot of work went into drainage and sustainability, so they held up pretty well last winter. Even so, a lot of work was still needed this spring to get them back into shape. The trails that are part of Escape LA all held up pretty well.