The Badger Mountain Challenge was my first ultra, which I ran with my partner (his first ultra as well). The consensus is that "50K" is now actually 55K, and that aligns with our experience. (Spoiler: We finished!)

We drove to Kennewick on Friday afternoon to pick up our bibs at Runner Soul. Typical of trail events, it was a straightforward affair—get your bib and go.

We took the early start at 6 am on Saturday. The race started from the Badger Mountain Trailhead parking lot, and there was plenty of parking at the early hour. We checked in with the race director, and when it was about time to start, joined about 8 other runners also starting early (the rest of the 55K runners started an hour later). The race director gave a short briefing—follow the pink markers, thank the volunteers, don't go out too hard, and take care of your feet.

Badger Mountain and the surrounding area is in a desert, sage scrub all around, so you have clear views all around. And the weather was fantastic—40s at start and warming to 60s with mostly clear skies. We got to see a pretty spectacular sunrise glimmering on the Columbia River as we started our day. The downside, later in the day there was no respite from the sun except when a cloud drifted in front of it.

The course—an out and back—is described as "deceptively challenging", and I get what they mean. Overall we clocked about 5300 feet of elevation gain. The obvious climbs are at the start, over Badger (~800 feet) and then Candy Mountain (~600 feet). There are some stairs at the start of Badger, but the rest of the ascent and descent of Badger is pretty symmetric and moderately graded with lots of switchbacks, so portions of the ascent on the way out felt runnable and running down felt comfortable. The trails on Badger and the front half of Candy (with the exception of the road crossing) are packed gravel and wide enough to easily allow passing—important as many of the 100 milers were coming in as we headed out.

The course changes up on the back half of Candy—steep and rocky on the way down. The bottom of Candy brought the one major glitch of the day. You run along a wide dirt drive for a short way before turning left. We missed it. Fortunately we were only about 0.2 mile past the turn when we realized it—lack of markers were a tip off and my partner had the GPS track on his watch. We turned back and found the turn easily, and also why we missed it. The flags were all on the left, along a 270 angle turn. A chalk arrow would have been useful to stay on course there.

The turn takes you into a long culvert under the highway, so it's nice to have a light on your way through. This also brings you to the more deceptive and, I think, unexpectedly challenging part of the course—the "flat" part. This is the the longer road section, maybe 1.5 miles, starting with a long shallow uphill. You're soon on a wide dirt path between the road and the vineyards, before ending up on unmaintained drives along the edge of the vineyards. The vineyard roads are undulating, and a mix of once asphalt that's started breaking up and gravel roads.

After a few miles meandering along vineyards, you hit the jeep tracks—rutted, sandy, rocky ups and downs, some of them quite steep. According to some other runners (regular start 50Kers who'd caught up to us), the trails were actually in pretty good condition compared to last year when they were inches of moon dust. The jeep tracks take you to the turn around, which means you're just going right back to them.

On the way back, we knew the jeep tracks would suck. The vineyards and road section were a grind (part of the "deceptive" characteristic, roads should be easy but they started to wear us down). Then it was back under the highway and up Candy. The return trip over Candy is brutal. It's mile 28 and now you're doing 600 ft over the course of a mile instead of 1.5+ miles at the start. The return over Badger wasn't so bad, but by the time we hit it, we were simply beat.

The volunteers along the course were fantastic. The spread at the aid stations was awesome—a lot of standard staples (chips, oreos, orange slices, water and gu brew) at all plus some different "specialties" at each (coffee at one, grilled cheese at another). The stations were also pretty well distributed, about every 5 miles with another at the 17ish mile turnaround. Having the 2 close aid stations on either side of the turnaround was really helpful since this was a more challenging section of the course.

As promised, the race director was waiting at the finish to give us a high five. The WSU Tri-Cities nursing school had volunteers providing foot soaks and bandaging at the finish.

Since it was our first 50K, it was nice to get a medal at the end to add to our collection. It was a long and exhausting day, but any first 50(ish)K would have been for us. The event was generally well marked and well organized.