Below you’ll find the map for Alpine Shop’s Spring Trail Run Series second race, happening this Thursday, May 8 at Castlewood State Park. This is brand new combination of trails that we’ve never used before on the series and should be a lot of fun. The distance shouldn’t be that long, but there are two hills you’ll have to contend with this week. (But that just means all the more fun to come down, right?)
We’ll start off at our new home near the pavilion – just like we did last week – and begin on the same trail you ended on last week. Instead of heading up the steep steps of Fern Glen Connector, though, we’ll stay to the right and up the gradual incline of the Grotpeter trail. We’ll follow it all the way up past Fern Glen and then hang a left on the Midway / Office Connector back down to the valley where we’ll cross Kiefer Creek Road near the park office and hit this week’s water station.
Head back into the woods running parallel to the creek towards the Start/Finish line, but we’re not done yet. Instead of crossing the road, we’ll head up the steep fire road to the Meramec River overlook on the bluffs. It’s almost all downhill from there. You’ll head down the swtichbacks of Lone Wolf Trail back to down to the creek (without crossing it) and stay on the South side of Kiefer Creek back to the bridge. You’ll cross Kiefer Creek Road there and retrace your steps to the Finish line.
We’re going to estimate the length of the run at about 3.8 miles. (We’ll see how close we are once we get an average of everybody’s phones and gps units after the race.)
Registration is still open for this race at this link, or simply click on the “Register Run” button to the right.
How long approximately is the run for Series #2?
Stacie- since this is a completely new course for us, we don’t have a true measure for it (and we’ve been pretty badly wrong in the past on a few courses we thought we had nailed down). I believe it’s between 3.5 and 4 miles, but we’ll be actually physically measuring it in the next couple of days to give you a better idea just exactly the distance we’ll be covering.
-Todd