Free. You can start with nothing.
A 100+ mile (100 Mile) and 100K self-supported ultramarathon on U.S. Forest Service trails and roads in the Cascade Mountains near Plain and Leavenworth, Washington. There are no aid stations, no course markings and no pacers; runners navigate by written directions and a paper map, filter their own water from streams, and check in with Search and Rescue volunteers at staffed checkpoints using a bib number and password. The 100 Mile is two laps of the same Deep Creek start/finish, each lap a different route; the 100K, added in 2014, is the first lap only.
Founded in 1997 by Tom Ripley and Christina Ralph of the Cascade Running Club (which also directed the Ron Herzog 50K, White River 50 Miler and Bridle Trails Twilight 8 Hour) as Washington's first 100-mile trail race, three weeks apart from Cascade Crest 100 the same year. Six runners started the first race; a snowstorm above 6,500 feet ended it early with no finishers. The first finishers were Tim Stroh and Randy Gerke in 1998; Liz McGroff became the first woman finisher in 2002. The original start/finish was Thousand Trails Lodge; in 2011 it moved to Deep Creek, with an added out-and-back spur to Thousand Trails to keep the distance the same, and the race course has not changed since. A 100K (the first loop only) was added in 2014. Wildfires cancelled the race in 2003 and 2015; in 2014 a wildfire forced a course modification that dropped the Tommy and Tyee checkpoints and added a foot-access-only Whistling Pig Meadow checkpoint; 2020 was cancelled for COVID-19; 2018, 2022 and 2026 were cancelled for wildfire. Tom Ripley and Christina Ralph retired as race directors in 2015, handing the race to long-time participant and SAR Support Team Commander Tim Stroh together with Tim Dehnhoff.
4 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.
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.
