Oregon Trail was quite an adventure. Day 1, stage 1 was very exciting for us as we came across one of our fellow competitors holding out the dreaded red cross sign. This is an emergency medical situation and we put our training into action. We stopped the next car and sent them to the radio location to notify the organizers that a competitor needed help. Then we rendered what aid we could while stopping the rest of the cars. The driver had some injuries that required a trip to the hospital but the co-driver was still okay. We stayed around until sweep and aid got there and then transited stage 2 to go get our head back in the rally. We ended up winning our class, but that was less of a concern than the health of our competitor. We were glad to hear later about their condition.
Day 2 was the classic Dufur stages and gave us a chance to stretch the legs of the powerful BRZ. And it really responded to the opportunity. Looking at the combined national/regional scores, we finished in the top 10 on all but one stage and the top 5 on a couple. We would have won 2WD overall vs. some really tough competitors, to boot.
Day 3 was a little more exciting. We started the morning continuing the pace of the previous day but struggled on the Maryhill hillclimb stage, half-spinning on the gravel-strewn tarmac and had a little trouble getting restarted. We did okay on the tarmac freeway stage (that was fun!) but the second run of Maryhill was also slow for us as we had to crawl through the now-gravel stage on our slicks. Steven really took out his frustration on the last two stages of the day. Top 4 times on both sealed the rally as a success for the team!
