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| June 3, 2005
SUMMER FESTIVALS All Hail the Dipsea! When it comes to summer shindigs, the Dipsea Race is the granddaddy of them all. BY MATTHEW STAFFORD The venerable Dipsea Race has been an annual event for 100 years. Its fame has spread far beyond Marin, attracting runners from all parts of the world who want to pit their stamina, feet and knees against our mountain, trails and brambles. But it all began in 1905... As years go, 1905 was especially rich with possibilities and potential. Both Teddy Roosevelt and the Paris Métro were inaugurated, as was the Trans-Siberian Railway. Roald Amundsen made his way to the North Pole, the Giants beat the A’s four games to one in the World Series, and in Marin County, California, a footrace described by Hearst’s chronically bombastic San Francisco Examiner as “the greatest cross-country run that was ever held in this or any other country” took place up and over the flanks of Mt. Tamalpais. By the time that first Dipsea Race was held—exactly 100 years ago this autumn, by the way—weekend hikers had been enjoying the glories of Mt. Tamalpais for decades, scrambling over trails originally broken by the Coast Miwok and savoring crystalline views of coast range, ocean and bridgeless bay. Regional mountaineering became especially popular in the 1880s and ’90s with the completion of stage roads and an alpine railway and Sanborn & Knapp’s publication of a detailed Mt. Tam trail guide. One of the mountain’s first blazed footpaths was the Dipsea (known then as the Lone Tree Trail, after one of the few redwoods to survive the mid-19th century lumbering boom that deforested much of Mt. Tam), and the route’s challenging topography (undulating from 90 to 760 to 160 to 1,360 to 80 feet above sea level), as well as its dazzling variety of terrain (woods, meadows, ranchland, even damp, overgrown quasi-jungle), made it a pleasant option for the era’s heartier specimens to make their way from southern Marin to the seashore. One summer day in 1904, two of these weekend warriors—members of the Olympic Club, a San Francisco organization venerable enough to have been organized 38 years before the first modern Olympics in 1896—planned to do just that, lighting out from the Mill Valley train depot for the Dipsea Inn, a newly opened seaside tavern on the sandspit just to the northwest of what is now Stinson Beach. Naturally, bets were laid as to which Olympian would scale this particular Parnassus fastest, and it was such an invigorating afternoon—galloping down the mountain’s leeward meadows after a 1,360-foot climb would invigorate anyone—they decided to make a regular thing of it, open to all comers. The following year, on November 19, 1905, 84 runners assembled in downtown Mill Valley and began a tradition that’s witnessed a cataclysmic earthquake, two world wars, the rise and fall of communism and the splitting of the atom—not to mention Sartre, Joyce, Picasso, Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Louis Armstrong and the walk on the moon. By all accounts, that inaugural race was worth perpetuating. The Olympic Club’s sponsorship helped attract Northern California’s top runners. Long-distance competitions were a newly popular sport in the wake of the three recent Olympics and the Boston Marathon—with the Dipsea, one of the country’s two oldest footraces—and the big San Francisco papers were out in force. (In years to come the race would also be covered by the Saturday Evening Post and Sports Illustrated, broadcast on ABC and immortalized by Chronicle sportswriter Bill McGeehan in his “Song of the Dipsea Trail.”) Rain began to fall shortly after the starting gun was fired at 10:20am, and there was a good deal of sliding and tumbling down the muddy, slippery trail while trainloads of spectators from the West Point Inn cheered on the athletes. The last stretch was across 1.3 grueling miles of soft sand, and 20 runners collapsed at the finish line and had to be revived by Olympic Club trainer Bob Cornell. The winner was 18-year-old Oakland High senior John Hassard, who had never been over the trail before that morning. The Olympic Club and the Dipsea Inn hosted a feast for 500 after the race, and a good time was had by all. Two concepts introduced at the inaugural event endure to this day. First, a (sometimes goofy) handicapping system was put in place to give a wide spectrum of runners a chance at crossing the finish line before anyone else. For the first 60 years of the Dipsea, head starts of up to 15 minutes were bestowed on a case-by-case basis, with each runner’s past performance record the criterion. This largely subjective system was replaced with a strictly age-based setup in 1965; gender was taken into account as well beginning in 1969, when the number of female entrants increased significantly. Happy outcomes of the Dipsea handicapping system have included 60-year-old Jack Kirk’s 1967 first-place win and 9-year-old Megan McGowan’s 1991 trophy. The race’s other enduring facet is its very loosely defined course. Runners are permitted to follow any route (and carefully camouflaged shortcut) between the Mill Valley depot and Stinson Beach, although a few areas have been declared off-limits since the mid-’70s (including the entire stretch of Panoramic Highway between the Mountain Home Inn and the top of Insult Hill just above Stinson). Despite a longstanding tradition of gashes, punctures, spills, heat prostration and twisted ankles and place names like Suicide, Dynamite and Cardiac, the Dipsea Trail is the trajectory of choice for most every runner; the legend and lore of the thing practically demand it. The race begins, as it has for a century, in Mill Valley’s Lytton Square, right next to the old train depot. (The chief of police used to initiate things by firing his pistol into the air and shouting, “Get outta town, you varmints!”) After a quarter-mile dash up Throckmorton Avenue, runners cross Old Mill Park and take on the course’s most fabled challenge: the 676 Dipsea Steps. Built, along with most of Mill Valley’s several other tucked-away staircases, when the town was laid out in the early 1890s, the three flights that make up the Steps were originally constructed of 671 logs and have the expedient if exhausting effect of delivering you from the floor of Cascade Canyon to the flanks of Mt. Tam in a matter of minutes. (“Old Dipsea runners never die,” racing legend Kirk once said. “They just reach the 672nd step.”) One hundred-fifty yards up Sequoia Valley Road from the top of the Steps is the Flying Y Housing Development, a nonequestrian descendant of the Flying Y Ranch and a distant reminder of when a goodly portion of the Dipsea crossed private grazing land and runners had to negotiate (or leap over) some 15 fence stiles on their dash to Stinson. The Monterey cypress on the dirt path just past the development tells you that you’ve only made it 1 mile into the 7.1-mile course. In a few (uphill) moments you cross Panoramic Highway and gallop down Hauke Hollow to Muir Woods Road. (Runners used to take a more direct if precipitous route over the ridge until local homeowners objected, sometimes with hired guards and barbed wire.) There’s a nice tree-shaded trail at this juncture, but most runners opt for the wide-open freedom of the asphalt. Turn left at the mailboxes and you’re leaping down an accident-prone stretch of the Dipsea known as Suicide, which until 1978 was a more or less sheer drop to Muir Woods and is now a quasi-navigable if still vertical trail. At its base is a service road (Mile 2) and then the Muir Woods parking lot, then Redwood Creek and its relatively new footbridge. (Following tradition, many runners splash their way through the creek instead.) Straight ahead is the course’s longest steep section, an interminable half-mile climb through the redwoods known as Dynamite. Up top, at Deer Park Fire Road (Mile 3), things gentle out a bit as you make your way up the Hogsback, just over a mile of rolling, breezy grassland that was once part of the huge Brazil Brothers Ranch. Conventional wisdom has it that the Hogsback is where the Dipsea is won or lost: The relatively gentle upslope is, temptations aside, an ideal place for making up lost time. (The big lichen-covered outcropping just past the first telephone pole is called “Halfway Rock” for purposes of timing, not distance; most of the remaining 56 percent of the trail is downhill.) Deer Park is the next microclimate on your trek: a densely wooded forest primeval of fallen logs, gnarled old tree roots and filtered sunlight. Its coup de grâce is its final 300 yards: a staggering uphill climb called Cardiac (Mile 4). Once conquered, you’re rewarded with a glorious panorama of ocean, city and bay, the realization that you’ve reached the trail’s highest point (1,360 feet), and the knowledge that it’s (almost) all downhill from here. After a stretch of hillside-hugging, the trail meets Lone Tree Fire Road and the Lone Tree itself, now surrounded with Douglas firs and other whippersnappers. (Up a nearby path is Lone Tree Spring and a fountain built by the Tamalpais Conservation Club in 1917, but you probably don’t want to drink from it.) Further on is a wooden fence (Mile 5) that’s removed on race day to allow Dipsea-ites quicker access into über-woodsy Steep Ravine, often considered the most dangerous section of the race. Here emboldened runners leap down sheer, mist-slick rocks and roots to the canyon’s floor and…one more energy-sapping uphill, the brief but more or less perpendicular Insult. Emerging into the sunlight and contemplating the last mile or so to the finish line, you can opt for the all-downhill Panoramic Highway to the right (Mile 6) or the one-time pastureland to the left now known as The Moors, with its tantalizing view of Stinson, lots of passing room and yet another uphill to contend with. The two paths meet in the sandy, scrubby forest below; after that it’s a sprint through tall grass and over a wooden stile (scene of many a grisly mishap) to Highway One, the town of Stinson Beach and that final invigorating dash to glory. After the soft-sand fiasco of 1905 and similar contretemps in 1906 (three front-runners collapsed from exhaustion within sight of the finish line), the race’s end point was moved to what is now the Stinson Beach grocery store, and there it remained until 1963. From 1964 to 1973 the race concluded at the Parkside Café on Arenal Avenue; nowadays runners take a left off the highway onto the park maintenance driveway just before Arenal and head for the finish line at the entrance to the south parking lot. This fabled course has witnessed many a memorable moment over the past hundred years: the crowd-pleasing presence of Isaac Day of Bolinas, who ran the race from 1905 to 1920 in heavy boots, woolen shirt, corduroy breeches and a fedora; a visit by Hannes Kolehmainen of Finland, who won three gold medals at the 1912 Olympics but passed on the Dipsea; the suffrage-era Women’s Dipsea Hikes of 1918-1922, probably the first women’s long-distance competitions in the U.S. (amazingly, women weren’t officially welcomed to the race proper until 1971); the Dipsea Eve celebrations of yore, when Olympic Club officials would hike the trail by torchlight, revel around a bonfire on the sands of Stinson and set off fireworks over the Pacific; the adventures of Norman Bright, who set a longstanding Dipsea record of 47:22 in 1937 and returned 33 years later, eyesight failing, to win the race; the spectacular four-year winning streak (1982-85) of the courtly Sal Vasquez, famous for assisting wayward competitors and other acts of trailside mensch-ness; the 1974 edition, when Ron Elijah set the all-time Dipsea record of 44:49; the enduring grandeur of 97-year-old Jack Kirk, who has run every Dipsea since 1930, a record unmatched in American sports. There have been movies about the Dipsea (Rob Nilsson’s 1986 indie hit On the Edge, starring real-life Dipsea runner Bruce Dern, as well as Drow Millar’s documentary on Jack Kirk and another by Ray Gatchalian on Harry Cordellos, a blind man who ran the Dipsea several times in the 1970s and ’80s); a Miss Dipsea from 1965-70, whose duties included firing the starting gun, riding to Stinson in a limo and kissing the winners; a 14.2-mile Double Dipsea, which starts (and ends) at Stinson; even an unbelievable Quadruple Dipsea, which has been completed by (among others) 77-year-old Mike Tselentis. This year’s race takes place Sunday, June 12 starting at 8:30am, when men 6 and under and 72 and over and women 8 and under and 63 and over sprint off with their 23-minute handicap. Scratch runners (men 19-30 years old) take off at 8:55am. Last year a new 3-2-1 Winner’s Penalty was adopted; under this rule, 2004’s champion (record-assaulter Shirley Matson, who crossed the finish line in 1:08:23) carries a three-minute penalty, 2003’s (Melody Ann Schultz) a two-minute penalty and so on. This way, über-runners like Matson and Schultz are placed in more compatible company without penalizing the other members of their age groups. A Centennial Celebration to honor and preserve the race, its origins and the grand old Dipsea Trail itself will be held in Mill Valley’s downtown plaza Saturday, June 11, with booths from Mill Valley and Stinson Beach historical groups, sales of authentic Dipsea T-shirts and more. For information call 415/331-3550 or visit www.dipsea.org. SUMMER FESTIVALS BY CITY Corte Madera |
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SUMMER FESTIVALS BY CITY Corte Madera |
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