Trans Iowa Stories: The Landslide

Trans Iowa v4 was fraught with difficulties on my end, but one thing stands out.

Note: With the recent developments in this year's Tour de France, I was reminded of a story from T.I.v4 which seems relevant to tell now, even though it is a bit out of sequence with the timeline I've established. I hope you all enjoy this story.

When time came to run a Trans Iowa, you never knew what "Mother Nature" was going to throw at us. When Trans Iowa v4 occurred, it came after a Winter much like the one we experienced in 2018/19. We had a lot of snow late into early Spring, and then a fair amount of heavy rain followed that. The roads were torn up pretty badly, not unlike what we witnessed this Spring, and there were "other things" which we were quite unprepared for.

The Back Story For Today's Post: The Tour this year had an important climbing stage. The situation was that the peloton was to climb up to 2,770M and then descend a bit to a final climb which would end the second to last stage. With a Frenchman in the lead with two days to go, and a possibility of ending a 34 year drought for the French, you can imagine the importance of this stage to them.

From Twitter. A view of the mudslide that stopped the stage.

 The Frenchman, Alapillippe, led overall when the stage started, but stronger climbers were leading the way up to the penultimate summit. One of these, a Colombian by the name of Egan Bernal, had put enough time into Alaphillipe that by the time he reaches this penultimate summit he is the virtual leader of le Tour. This becomes a very crucial point.

Alaphillipe, obviously, is concerned, but being that he is the best descender in the peloton, and Bernal is merely adequate, he is banking on the long, technical descent before the final climb to claw himself back into the lead. But......

There was weather. Apparently a heavy storm had crossed the lower slopes there where the descent was to pass through and had dumped copious amounts of hail. This piled up like snow. It also caused a mudslide to occur. With riders careening down the mountainside at speeds you'd drive down the highway at, the Race Commissars were forced to neutralize the stage for the rider's safety. They took the time splits at the top of the penultimate stage as the final timing marks and called it all off for the day. Alaphillipe was "robbed" of a possibility to claw back into the lead by a freak of nature.

Now as I watched this, (at work- my boss runs the Tour replays on a big screen there), I was instantly reminded of Trans Iowa, and in particular, the craziness of Trans Iowa v4. This version of the Trans Iowa series of events has more than enough intrusions by Nature to write a small book. However; I won't drag all that out and unpack it here. That will be for later.

David Pals, my co-director for T.I.v4, scrambles over a freak Iowa mudslide. The route continues in the background.

We were at the checkpoint in Wadena, Iowa, a small village in Northeast, Iowa which is found down in a valley amongst the surrounding hills. Cell phone service, at that time, was sketchy at best in Wadena. Many riders were late to this checkpoint and had to abandon the event. It was due to many factors, but all that aside, we still had a healthy amount of leaders and they were all in a bunch yet.  This was unlike later Trans Iowa events, where everyone broke up into smaller couples, or were singly duking it out with the course and conditions.

So, David Pals, who was helping me direct Trans Iowa back then, and I decided we'd better get on up the road ahead of the racers as they were beginning to organize and leave the checkpoint themselves. We climbed up a hill, turned around it to the right, and then our jaws hit the floorboards of David's vehicle. What we saw was unprecedented. A landslide blocked our course!!

David is a trained and highly skilled geologist, so he hopped out, assessed the severity of the situation, and proclaimed that it appeared that the ground was firm enough for riders to cross over. I agreed, so we quickly found the smoothest crossing, marked it with surveyor's flags, and as we were wrapping up, the lead group came screaming around the corner. Their wide-eyed looks were comical, but we had no time for humor.

We quickly pointed out the flagged route, and as if on cue, the riders shouldered their bikes, tip-toed across, remounted, and were gone before we could even get a camera out to document the effort. One rider, who distrusted the pile of Earth, took off his shoes, crossed a fence, and ran around the mudpile! Either way, everyone was across. With that task taken care of, we backtracked to warn the remaining riders still in the event, and moved onward.

Thanks for reading! More "Trans Iowa Stories" will post on Sundays in the future.