Race sabotage shows worst, best in people.

Byline: Bob Welch The Register-Guard

Forget Waldo. What Craig Thornley, co-director of the Where's Waldo Ultramarathon, wants to know is this: Where is the chump, or chumps, who sabotaged our course?

And what were they thinking when they attempted - successfully, in many cases - to confound the 103 runners from around the country competing in the 100-kilometer race?

The alleged race sabotaging happened Aug. 18 on trails just east of Waldo Lake on the Willamette Pass.

Twenty-five miles into the 62.5-mile race, runner Meghan Arbogast came to an intersection of trails. The 46-year-old Corvallis woman had run the race twice before and trained on it numerous times this summer. She knew she needed to turn left, or north.

But the usual black-and-yellow directional arrows were missing. Branches were blocking the Pacific Crest Trail that she knew the course followed. And the pink ribbons that should have been tied to trees along the PCT were, instead, tied to a trail headed for Bobby Lake to the east.

Two other intersections along the course were tampered with in similar ways, suggesting this wasn't just some teenage prank but a person, or party, with an agenda.

If there's a hero to offset this gutless trail tampering, it's Arbogast. A two-time Olympic Trials marathoner, she stopped her race to rip down the ribbons and retie them to trees along the PTC. She sacrificed about two minutes in time; another runner, Sander Nelson, also of Corvallis, helped drag the branches off the trail.

"Whoever did this doesn't have a clue how intense your feelings are in a competition like this," Arbogast says. "Or how much time organizers put into this."

For masters competitors (older than 40), this was the national championship, with $4,200 in prize money on the line. But more significantly, this was a race that runners - regardless of age - had spent hundreds of days and thousands of miles on training.

For some, all for naught.

If Arbogast wasn't fooled, 30 runners who had come to the intersection before her were. Neil Olsen of Central Point, who was leading the race at the time, went an extra eight miles and finished in 54th place. Defending men's champion Lewis Taylor of Eugene went an extra 4.5 miles and finished 17th.

Some runners went east to Bobby Lake, others south, instead of north, on the PCT. One runner who took a wrong turn quit altogether. "She was dehydrated," Thornley says. "Had no idea where she was. And actually scared for her life."

Other runners got back on track. But the intersection sabotages added about 100 miles to those 30 runners.

Who did this and why? Those are the two big questions. And chances are, they'll never be answered.

Some scorned runner trying to pull ultramarathoning's version of the Olympic Trials attack on Nancy Kerrigan? Not likely. "We're like family," Arbogast says.

Thornley, the co-director of the race, has searched for the culprit like a mad man, scouring blog after blog of PCT hikers who had come through the area that weekend.

His theory? That some hiking purist, believing the directional signs were referring to a mountain-bike race, did the damage.

While Forest Service spokeswoman Judy McHugh reports little friction in recent years between groups that use the trail, some hikers believe that bikes ruin the wilderness experience.

"I suspect it's someone who wanted to keep bikes off the PCT," Thornley says. "A case of mistaken identity."

The reality: The ultramarathoners have been model stewards of the trails, which they use only with myriad stipulations placed on them by the Forest Service.

"I can't say enough about Craig and his group," says Bob Obermeyer, who's in charge of trail maintenance for the U.S. Forest Service Middle Fork Ranger District. "They go beyond what they need to do."

For one day's use, race volunteers maintain 48 miles of the 62.5-mile trail, year-round. And race proceeds are donated to the Willamette Pass Ski Patrol - about $5,000 this year alone.

The Forest Service says the race hasn't provoked complaints. Thornley says they've received only one, from campers at Gold Lake whose sleep was interrupted by runners in the wee hours of the morning. (Slower runners start at 3 a.m., others at 5 a.m. Runners finish in the early evening.)

Having been a race director before in Bend - and done some distance-running - I can understand how angered runners would be over having their training spoiled by someone else's selfish prank. But what's more troubling is the life-threatening danger this could have brought.

"We had folks out there who we lost track of for 2 1/2 hours," Thornley says.

Ultramarathoners get food and water at aid stations about every six miles in the Waldo race. They take only what they need. So a runner lost in the woods at the 5,000-foot elevation after having run, say, 50 miles, and with no food or water, is in big trouble, particularly if the weather is hot, cold or wet.

"The sabotaging was devastating in two ways," says Dr. Larry Dunlap, who was on hand at the race's medical facility at Willamette Pass Ski Area. "The heartbreak of people training for a national championship, and how close we came to having people get in trouble.

"I don't think it would make any difference, because I don't think the saboteurs have much in the way of consciences, but protesters need to understand that your protest, in certain ways, can endanger lives. It's like driving a nail in a tree to protest logging."

Dunlap was part of a team of emergency personnel that had to take a lost and badly dehydrated runner, at midnight, out of the Rosary Lakes area of the course. Though her getting lost had nothing to do with trail sabotage, the runner had become disoriented and was vomiting.

She was initially given aid by two hikers. Given Thornley's conjecture that hikers did the sabotage, the couple's involvement in helping the runner is a good reminder not to assume that all hikers have become trail terrorists.

People are people. Some, such as whoever rerouted the course, are cowards. Some are courageous, such as the runners who, in a 62.5-mile race, came to realize they had been snookered but still finished the race. And some remind us that poetic justice still lives.

Remember, Arbogast, the runner from Corvallis who didn't have to stop at that intersection and right the wrong, but, for the benefit of others, did?

She was Waldo's overall winner, setting a new course record in the process.