Ryan Stuart, explore's gear editor
Ryan Stuart's tell all blog spot on his gear addiction and life and times as explore magazine's gear editor
Push R for Rescue
SPOT, findmespot.com
The Yukon 1000 sounds insane. Take the Yukon River Quest canoe race and triple it. Racers will paddle in teams or solo from Whitehorse to the Alaska Pipeline on the Yukon River.
This year's race will be a first annual running. And it will be a first of another sort. As far as I know, let me know if I'm wrong, this will be the first race that will use SPOT devices to keep track of participants. (I wrote about SPOT in the March 08 issue of explore in the explorata section.)
The race's press release says: "In the past, putting on a race of any length has required a small army of volunteers to man checkpoints. But this race will be using the new Spot devices...This race is long. We anticipate the leaders taking seven or eight days to complete the course. We require that every boat carries a Spot device and check in several times a day. We want to prevent racers from being "overenthusiastic" and paddling all night so we will require each boat check in every evening before 11:15, and again in the morning from the same place at least six hours later. This enforces a night time stop for each boat. We have our own software that displays racers in order automatically from the Spot data as well as displaying the racer’s positions almost real time in Google Earth. This is a completely new way of running a race that has not been possible before."
It sounds great, but I have a nagging concerns. Isn't part of racing the interaction between volunteers and racers? Isn't it safer to have real people along the course to help out in emergencies or just with moral support? What do you think about the loss of personal interaction? Is this a slippery slope?
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