by Jess Evans
February 20, 2018
If you listened to Randy Erickson’s podcast when he interviewed me, you may already know the story of how I got into adventure racing, but I am a much better storyteller in print than verbally, so I will tell it again, with a little more flare… hopefully.
I grew up in rural Colorado on a small farm, and I played summer soccer from a young age where I ran constantly on the field. My family would also hike and camp in the mountains regularly. I had the foundation for someone who spends a lot of time outside.
I went to college at Purdue University in Indiana far away from the mountains of Colorado. I majored in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeology. I had always loved history and had a little taste of archaeology as a child when I would dig up “artifacts” from an old abandoned school house near my parent’s home. Archaeology is where I learned to read topographic maps. In those days (the 1990s), archaeological sites were recorded by hand, on topographic maps (GIS was not widely in use yet). If you needed to locate that site again, you had to use the topo map to find them. I would go out to the farm fields with map and compass in hand and pace count (in meters) to the archaeological site. Little did I know that this skill would lead me to an exciting sport later in life.
I will skip ahead about 10 years. I was at Otter Creek Park in Kentucky working in the Nature Center and the Recreation Department. I learned how to climb an alpine tower, belay, and rappel at the park and taught visitors how to do these activities too. It was a blast! In September of 2007, my supervisor announced that Stephanie, from Flying Squirrel Adventures, would be putting on an adventure race in the park, and I would be helping with the ropes section. I had no idea what an adventure race was, but it all sounded fun.
That day I had the pleasure of observing an adventure race in action. It was biking, paddling, trekking, rappelling, climbing an alpine tower, and all while using a topo map and compass to find their way around the course. Holy moly – this was great! Uncertainty about the sport, and all that gear, kept me as an AR volunteer for two more years, but eventually, I got up the courage to try one – “The FIG” in Red River Gorge, Kentucky.
