Helly Hansen Prunesco Lead After PC3

PC 3 at Rio Perales was in dense and decaying forest at the side of long disused logging track. All over this region there is a jumble of fallen wood and logs and even the open pampas is dotted with tree stumps and piles of twisted and weather bleached branches. The checkpoint was in an area of living forest, but the ground was still littered with dead wood and debris, so much so it was hard to find any place to camp and there were tents dotted all over the place.

It wasn’t an easy place to get to by vehicle. The race had to clear the way and the last part of the track was 4x4 access only, but by last night the race staff and press team were in place to see who came out of the forest first.

It was a long, long wait. On the expectation the top teams would take 15 hours to cover the 55km, the hope was that they would be arriving late evening, but as the rain increased in intensity and darkness fell no one had yet arrived. It wasn’t until daylight next day, around 7am, that team Helly Hansen Prunesco arrived, and they were very surprised to still be leading!

They had taken 30 hours to get to PC3 and had expected others to have passed them. “That was brutal,” said Bruce Duncan. “It was really windy on the climb, then at the top it was thick forest, so thick you had to force a way through using your arms and difficult in the dark, but I think we did OK and we’d climbed up onto the hills by daylight. When we switched off the torches we could see other lights still down in the forest below but had no idea who they were. Then it was just all bog and more bog, we were up our ankles in water all the way and pushing hard to try and get the trek completed in daylight but when we came off the hill we could see the whole valley below was flooded – there were pools of water everywhere.”

“Then we got into thick, thick bushes again and then forest which was better, but it was getting dark and we couldn’t find the end of the track the checkpoint was on. We were worried about overshooting and I think we may have only been a couple of hundred metres out, but we were so tired and cold we decided to stop. If we’d found it we’d have been here hours ago, but instead we had the coldest bivouac I’ve ever known. It was raining heavily and we didn’t really get any sleep. Everything is soaked. I would happily have given up then.”