Boone's tale of the Dipsea Race, the oldest trail race in America, run since 1905 from Mill Valley over the shoulder of Mount Tamalpais and down through the Muir Woods country to Stinson Beach.
Now don't roll through these hills thinking they're only good for looking at — because people have been running themselves half to death across this mountain for more than a hundred years, on purpose, and there's a tale in that. Name's Ranger Boone Merrick, and let me tell you about the Dipsea.
That town we're passing through, Mill Valley, is where it starts. Every June since nineteen hundred and five, folks have lined up there and raced clear across Mount Tamalpais on foot — over the shoulder of the mountain and down through the redwood country to the sand at Stinson Beach, about seven and a half miles of the meanest, steepest, most beautiful ground you ever saw. It's the oldest trail race in all of America, and to this day one of the strangest.
It opens with a gut-punch: near seven hundred steps, straight up out of Mill Valley, so many that runners see stars before they even reach the dirt. Then it's up and over Tam and down past a climb so cruel they named it Cardiac Hill, with runners plunging down brushy ravines and leaping roots and rocks on shortcuts, trusting their ankles to the good Lord.
And here's the part I love. It's a handicap race — the old and the young get a head start on the fast and the strong. So the winner, more often than you'd guess, isn't some strapping youngster. Grandmothers have won it. Children have won it. A man past his sixties has crossed first, ahead of runners a third his age, on legs that had climbed this mountain fifty years. So as we drive up the very slopes those runners cross at a dead sprint, tip your hat to them, friend — this whole mountain is a racecourse and a cathedral at once, and we're headed for the quietest, oldest heart of it.
Photo: LPS.1 · CC BY-SA 3.0
