Free. You can start with nothing.
A 25K (about 15.5 mile) loop starting and finishing at the Grayson Highlands Visitor Center, the shortest ultra-adjacent distance offered at this race weekend. Handbook FAQ ranks it 'Beginner Friendly.' Runs on the same park trail system and highland balds as the 50K and 50 Mile, though the exposure warning in the runners handbook is framed as hitting 'especially the ultras' hardest.
Only the Start and Finish, both at the Visitor Center and unaffected by any mid-course change, are recorded below.
A 50 Mile, 50K and 25K trail race sharing one start/finish at the Grayson Highlands State Park Visitor Center in Mouth of Wilson, Virginia, crossing the open, treeless highland balds where a managed herd of wild ponies roams. The course runs over Little Pinnacle / Haw Orchard Mountain at 5,089 feet, described by the American Trail Running Association as the highest race in Virginia, with views of Mount Rogers, the state's highest point.
Run Bum Tours' own registration page calls the 2027 edition the '13th annual Grayson Highlands trail races,' implying a 2015 first year, corroborated by ultrasignup.com's own results archive for this event listing back to 2015. The American Trail Running Association's event page separately states a first year of 2018, a conflict recorded here rather than resolved. The 50K-specific results on UltraSignup go back to 2016 and the 50 Mile distance's results only as far as 2020, consistent with the event having grown its distance lineup over time, though no source states this directly.
| Mile | Station | Cutoff | Crew access | Bag | Pacer | Med | To next |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.00 | Grayson Highlands Visitor Center | ? | ● | ? | ? | ? | ? |
| 15.53 | Grayson Highlands Visitor Center | ? | ● | ? | ? | ? | ? |
3 people have been out there with a camera or a microphone.
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.
