Over the River, Through the Woods for Adventurists

The front-runners were fading fast after grabbing an early lead in the 53-mile Pumpkin Scramble adventure race high in the Santa Monica Mountains. After a series of grueling hill climbs, the four-member team had fallen to eighth place among the 39 teams competing in the fall contest.

Andy Tubbs, the youngest member of the team, was on the verge of collapse. His teammates, including brother Tony, fed him cookies and gave him water. It would be only a matter of minutes before the calories would kick in, they told him. So suck it up. Then, each teammate took on some of the weight from Andy’s backpack.

One tied a short length of surgical tubing to Andy’s waist and set out again on the trail, pulling him to create momentum. Soon Andy was moving on his own and strong enough to complete the trail run and scramble past a small boulder field up to Topanga Lookout.

The contestants were on their way to Checkpoint 4 of 26 on a route that covered a wide swath of the Santa Monica Mountains. They would have to struggle up steep slopes, use ropes to rappel down cliffs, navigate a labyrinth of dead-end trails, plot map coordinates to find hidden checkpoints, paddle rafts with two teammates blindfolded, complete a bike ride over the highest point in the Santa Monicas and, finally, paddle kayaks over eight miles of ocean to the finish line at Paradise Cove in Malibu.

The Pumpkin Scramble is similar to about 15 adventure races held annually in Southern California in which teams compete along race courses of varying lengths, each designed to test racers with a variety of muscle-burning outdoor events and almost-anachronistic skills requiring maps, compasses and wilderness savvy.

Competing in teams of three and four members, the contestants were largely weekend warriors in their 20s and 30s from Southern California. Sponsored by the Van Nuys company Hidden Frontcountry Expeditions and Adventure Racing, the scramble lacked the television coverage or $20,000 prizes of other races. But it distinguished itself by interspersing long stretches of sheer toil with oddball events requiring creativity on the fly.

For example, racers were not told beforehand about the Maze, a route-finding challenge they faced after 20 miles of trail running, biking and scrambling over steep, rocky terrain. The point of the Maze was to reach a plastic pumpkin doubling as Checkpoint 12. It was only two miles by trail from an established road, but finding it required precise compass work to navigate numerous forks in the trail. Two hasty wrong turns could lead a team far away from the course, and skipping the checkpoint added two hours to the team’s final time.

Dozens of racers were stalled by flat tires on their ride up a thorny path to the Maze. But the Tubbs brothers’ team somehow escaped the thorns and retook the lead by connecting three bikes with surgical hose, allowing the lead biker to set the pace and cover the wind for the two attached bicyclists stretched out behind.

Past the Maze, a three-mile bike ride down Mulholland Highway led to Malibu Lake. Team members were told to stop talking as they approached the checkpoint. Then, two members of each team were fitted with blindfolds, given paddles and, along with their teammates, ushered into small inflatable rafts. Without speaking to each other, teammates had to figure out how to get to an island in the middle of the lake.

Each team linked its two boats together with tubing. Some teams used the blindfolded teammates to paddle while, on others, racers who could see did the paddling.

“I couldn’t see at all so I did one left stroke, one right stroke,” said John MacMiller, 37, a carpenter with the Tubbs team. “I thought we were going around in circles.” Paddling on a placid lake may have seemed like a respite compared with the previous 23 miles, but lumbering out of the rafts after 30 minutes of kneeling in wetness, many racers found themselves fighting leg cramps and blisters. Fifteen teams dropped out.

The Tubbs team still led after Malibu Lake, but 400 yards behind was a coed team called MRT. Both teams struggled up Kanan Dume Road and over to Latigo Canyon Road, at which point the racers had surmounted almost all of the 10,000 vertical feet they would climb that day.

Thirteen miles remained in the race when MRT got lost searching for a trail head leading to Escondido Canyon. The Tubbs four were 40 minutes ahead by the time they got off their bikes for the last time after 43.5 miles and began one final trail run.

The run wound through a small canyon, and racers splashed beneath a Pacific Coast Highway underpass to the beach, a mile from Paradise Cove. Race volunteers and sea kayaks were waiting at the cove past sundown when the Tubbs team arrived. The team donned wetsuits and life jackets and pushed off in two kayaks for the last event, an eight-mile ocean paddle in calm seas. Fourteen hours and 17 minutes after starting, the Tubbs team emerged from the advancing waves of fog and pulled ashore.

Race volunteers whooped and flashbulbs popped, but the four racers seemed capable of no more than weak grins. Told that the prize for winning was admission to the upcoming Four Winds Adventure Race, they showed little reaction.

“Another race?” one moaned. “Let’s think about that later.”