Free. You can start with nothing.
A 135-mile (217 km) non-stop point-to-point road ultramarathon from Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park (280 ft below sea level, the lowest point in North America) to the Whitney Portal trailhead (8,360 ft), crossing three mountain ranges with 14,600 ft of cumulative ascent and 6,100 ft of descent. Marketed as "The World's Toughest Foot Race" and the "135-Mile World Championship," it is an invitational, application-only race with a mandatory 2-4 person crew and support vehicle for every competitor, a 45-hour time limit, and three staggered night-time start waves.
AdventureCORPS' own materials describe the 2026 edition as "the 49th anniversary of 'the world's toughest foot race'" (2026 minus 49, inclusive, gives 1978 as year one). A separate page in the race's own Results & History section instead names "July 31, 1987" as the first organized multi-competitor event, the "US vs. UK Death Valley to Mt. Whitney Race," with 5 starters and 5 finishers -- likely the first race run head-to-head, as distinct from earlier solo crossing attempts of the same route (the route itself, and Al Arnold's solo crossings, predate any organized race; the blog's own year-archive list on badwater.com goes back to 1978).
| Mile | Station | Cutoff | Crew access | Bag | Pacer | Med | To next |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.00 | Badwater Basin (Start) | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | 17.70 |
| 17.70 | Furnace Creek | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | 24.30 |
| 42.00 | Stovepipe Wells | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | 8.80 |
| 50.80 | Mile 50.8 - 2000' Elevation Sign | 10:00am | ? | ? | ? | ? | 8.10 |
| 58.90 | Towne Pass | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | 13.90 |
| 72.80 | Panamint Springs Resort | 7:00pm | ? | ? | ? | ? | 17.90 |
| 90.70 | Darwin Turn-Off | 3:30am | ? | ? | ? | ? | 17.70 |
| 108.40 | Keeler | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | 14.40 |
| 122.80 | Lone Pine (Dow Villa Motel) | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | 8.40 |
| 131.20 | Portal Road (just below the switchbacks) | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | 3.80 |
| 135.00 | Whitney Portal (Finish) | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? |
20 people have been out there with a camera or a microphone.
+ 12 more.
These are other people's work and we link straight to them. Watching costs nothing and needs no account. More of them: every race we hold, on film.
Nobody sees it until we have read it. No account, no sign-in.
This changes nothing on the page on its own. Somebody checks it against the race first.
Somebody watches it before it goes anywhere near this page. What we are after is footage of this course, on the ground. If it would be just as true of any other race, it is not this.
We want the address of the file the race publishes, not the file. We download it from there so the page can say where the line came from.
We read every one of these and we write back. Every fact here carries the source it came from, and the way a wrong one gets fixed is a person checking it against what you tell us.
Cutoffs move, races get postponed, lotteries open and close. We read the race's own sources and record where every fact came from. Put your email in and we will send you what changed, and where we read it.
No account, and nothing to cancel.
What happens to your email. Nothing else. I do not sell it, and I will not send you anything except this race changing. One click gets you out.
I keep this catalog because the information is scattered and hard to trust. Telling you when it moves is the same job.
