Thank you Bill, BAOC and the whole NAOC 2021 organizing team. The quality of the event was great. I loved the map paper, print quality, the LIDAR vegetation, and the course.
Terrain was tougher than I expected with lots of dead fall on the ground, but the model map/terrain alerted us to that fact so we took that into account during planning.
Air quality was not that bad at all the first day and did not affect us physically in any way the second morning, even though visually it was pretty hazy.
As for our race, we pretty much did a clean race with dropping about 25 minutes being stuck in one of the green vegetation patches which all 15 hours prior was nowhere near uncrossable. That particular patch ended up also not being uncrossable just took us half an hour to cross 100 meters :)
Some of the highlights from the race in no particular order:
-Getting ice cold water from a cooler at the top of the ski lift servicing the downhill MTB folks
-Encountering at the top of one of the mountains, right after sunset, an RV with few dudes making tacos with smoked salmon and avocado, with beer in hand and blasting hard rock.
-Seeing the rising sun in the morning in baby pink color due to the ash from the fires.
-Racing HARD the last couple hours as even with all the planning and measuring I was not sure we can make it in time. Plus 10 meter contours are a bitch :) Encountering 10 of them closely spaced after 23 hours of racing was not fun
-Seeing the sunset from one of the highest points of the course (Mt Watson) with views of Lake Tahoe.
Technical stuff: I was able to load our track directly to Strava and all stats seem correct (had to trim the starting and ending few minutes ) with distance 47.8mi and elevation gain 13000+ feet.
https://www.strava.com/activities/5805632016