Jeff Pelletier

The Loowit Trail circumnavigates Mount St. Helens in Washington State, past old-growth forests, waterfalls, meadows, and the leftovers of the volcano A group of us ran the roughly 30 mile trail in August of 2018, starting from Climber’s Bivouac Campground. Including the 2 mile trail from Climber’s Bivouac to the junction with the Loowit Trail, it took us about 10 hours to run the roughy 34 miles (55 kms), with 7,700′ (2,365 metres) of elevation gain. The next day, a few of us did another roughly 19 mile (30 km) ‘lollipop’ run starting from Ape Canyon to explore the area a little further to the east of the Volcano, including Windy Ridge.

Unfortunately, the compass doesn’t appear to be accessible while recording, likely because it tends to use additional battery life so isn’t designed to be used for an extended period of time while also recording in Exercise mode (you should be carrying a good ol’ fashion compass and map as part of your 10 essentials anyway). This means it should use less battery life when used for an extended period of time, even in conjunction with the routes feature which load the route overtop of your breadcrumbs. Issues around reported poor GPS accuracy appear to have all been addressed in firmware updates in the fall, along with the addition of some of the core features that I really enjoyed in the Ambit series such as the ability to customize the screens for each sport mode. There are several other exciting features as part of the planned software updates coming soon to the Spartan, along with Points of interest navigation, support for training plans and structured workouts, and something called Route altitude profile navigation which sounds like a great feature for mountain runners.

Sun Mountain 100 km race and his experience as a fourth timer at this race hosted by Rainshadow Running. The Sun Mountain 50k and 50 mile courses are known to be quite ‘runnable’ compared to most trail races in the PNW, with roughly 5,000 feet of climbing in the 50k, and with hardly any technical terrain. Sun Mountain was my first 50 mile race three years ago, and I’d highly recommend it for anyone’s first crack at the 50k, 50M, and now 100k distance. See the full Sun Mountain 100k, 50M and 50K results here., and check out my race reports from the 2015 Sun Mountain 50 Miler and 2013 Sun Mountain 50M.

Join me for a new Spring edition of The Run Centre’s trail running clinic, every Saturday for 12 weeks starting March 12th. I’ll be covering everything from shoes, gear, nutrition and hydration, to race strategy, trail etiquette, and backcountry safety, with shoe demos, nutrition samples, and guest speakers, leading up to our goal race the Coast Mountain Trail Series ‘Survival of the Fittest‘ 13k and 18k. Explore the local trails, learn some new techniques, meet other runners and have fun!