Free. You can start with nothing.
The Kokopelli Loops in the Mack Ridge area, with a bonus lap of Rustler's Loop that brings runners through the Rustler's aid station twice. The course rolls between 4,500 and 5,400 feet.
Desert RATS runs on the Kokopelli trails above the Colorado River outside Fruita, in the high desert of western Colorado. Four distances start and finish at the Hawkeye Trailhead across three days in April, with a 100K and a 50K on the Saturday and a 21K and a 10K either side of them. The 100K goes out to the Western Rim and back, on 4WD road, singletrack and rocky, sandy ground. It is a UTMB World Series event, so finishing the 100K, 50K or 21K earns Running Stones for the UTMB World Series Finals lottery, and a qualifying finish in the 100K counts for the Western States lottery.
The first Desert RATS Trail Running Festival ran in April 2004, as a 50 mile race with 36 finishers. A 50K joined it in 2014 and the 50 mile was last run in 2016. The 2020 edition was cancelled. The 100K was first run in 2024. The field has grown steadily: the 50K had 175 finishers in 2019 and 422 in 2026. The 2026 running was the 23rd.
11 people have been out there with a camera or a microphone.
+ 3 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.
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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.
