Announcing the Hard Fall 24-Hour Adventure Race!

We are excited to announce the inaugural Hard Fall Adventure Race will take place on October 9-10th, in the Northeast Kingdom, Vermont. We’re excited to take you to a new area and have you navigating, paddling, biking, and trekking through the day and night. Registration will open next week. Come check out the full details!

2021 Catamount Winter Adventure Summary & Photos

GMARA was proud to host our second bite-sized adventure, returning to the Catamount Community Forest for a winter version of last summer’s event.


Our bite-sized approach to bringing outdoor adventure to families and friends lets teams participate in whatever way they preferred, on their own schedule. Nearly thirty teams donned skis and/or snowshoes to explore Catamounts beautiful trail network.

It sure didn’t hurt that we received a monster dump of snow right before the event opened. It didn’t stop there though – the snow kept coming through the week, and everyone had the opportunity to enjoy well groomed ski trails and some deep snowshoeing. You can see the photos teams shared, as well as their result sheets, in the photo gallery.


Teams received their instructions and two maps before the nine-day drop-in-whenever-you-like window began. The maps included the Catamount trail network and a topographical map with the checkpoints. There were ten on-trail points to get via skis and then ten off-trail to get via snowshoe. The first challenge was determining where on the trail network the checkpoints actually were! A bit of an additional challenge for the snowshoe leg was that you couldn’t travel along the ski trails.

It was fun to see the varied approaches, ranging from teams dropping by on multiple days to grab a few more points each time, to experienced teams pushing to do everything as quickly as they could in a single go. Several teams got on either skis or snowshoes for the first time for this event. One intrepid (crazy?) team started before 5:30am with -13°F temps!

We’re glad you all made the event your own!


While this was largely a non-competitive event, we’d be remiss to not share a pretty impressive time. Team Sterling Facts finished the full course in under two hours – 1:54 to be precise. An impressive feat of navigation, speed, and endurance!

Congratulations to everyone that participated. Keep your eyes out for another Bite Size adventure! For those curious for something bigger, the Bitter Pill is coming up later this summer. To everyone reading this, we hope you are finding time to have adventures, whatever size they may be!

Catamount Winter Adventure Maps Sent Out

All the points are hung at Catamount and maps have been sent out to all the teams. It is absolutely beautiful out there; you won’t go wrong with some time in the woods. It’s not too late to register; you can sign up and participate at any point up until February 14th. Have fun!

2021 Bitter Pill Adventure Race – Registration is Open!

We are excited to open registration for the 2021 Bitter Pill, based out of the Craftsbury Outdoor Center in Craftsbury, Vermont, on August 14th. Expect a classic GMARA adventure, with varied biking terrain, off-trail trekking, and scenic Vermont paddling. A few surprises are in the mix as well!

We’ll be following a strict set of COVID-related protocols to keep racers and volunteers safe.

We are working to finalize the number of available boats which will dictate how many two-person (tandem kayaks) and three-person (canoes) teams we can have in the event. We will be limited by either available watercraft or Vermont COVID guidelines, so sign up soon to secure your entry. Slots will be filled on a first come, first serve basis.

Have questions? Reach out! We’d love to hear from you.

2021 Race Schedule

A good news, bad news story. Regretfully, we will not be holding the Frigid Infliction this winter. We have heard from many of you that were hopeful (we were too,) but the realities of doing a winter race, with proper safety protocols, with the type of experience we prefer, just wasn’t logistically possible.

But enough of the bad news! In good news, we will be holding another Catamount Adventure, this time in February, and returning to our premiere summer event, the Bitter Pill. We’ll be hosting the Bitter Pill in the Craftsbury area in August in expect to firm up dates in the next two weeks. We’re looking forward to bringing the race back to a region that we haven’t been to in more than a decade, and partnering with local premiere racers to delight you with the course.

We may have a few other surprises along the way. We are looking forward to seeing you in 2021!

2020 Catamount Adventure Summary and Photos

GMARA was excited to sponsor the 2020 Catamount Adventure!

This was the first year of this event, a bite-sized approach to bringing outdoor adventure to families and friends that would let them participate in whatever way they preferred, on their own schedule. With not even two weeks notice, we had more than twenty teams of all ages and abilities signed up and ready to have an adventure.

It turns out fall in Vermont is every bit as beautiful as we remember; it was wonderful to explore the trails (and off-trails!) in the Catamount Community Forest. You can see the photos teams shared, as well as their result sheets, in the photo gallery.


Teams received their instructions and two maps before the nine-day drop-in-whenever-you-like window began. The maps included the Catamount trail network and a topo map with the checkpoints. There were ten on-trail points to get via bike and then ten off-trail to get via foot. The first challenge was determining where on the trail network the checkpoints actually were!

It was fun to see the varied approaches, ranging from teams dropping by on multiple days to grab a few more points each time, to experienced teams pushing to do everything as quickly as they could. Some people combined the bike and trek together. For one team the biking leg consisted of pushing a jogging stroller. Some teams went on truly gorgeous days and others braved the rain.

We’re glad you all made the event your own!


With people participating separately, there was no way for them to know how well they did compared to the others. The teams pushing for the top time had no idea if someone was figuratively hot on their heels. It turned out that the top two teams finished within forty-one seconds of each other!

Team Sterling Facts finished in 1:59:25 and team If Found, Saran Wrap to Tree finished in 2:00:06. The latter team has already informed their father that he cost them the win when he made them stop for a photo as they crossed paths in the woods. Excuses, excuses…

Congratulations to everyone that participated. Who knows, this may just be your first step to a bigger adventure. If so, GMARA is here to help with that!

Announcing 2020 Catamount Adventure!

We’re excited to share that we’ll be sponsoring a drop-in ‘bite size’ adventure at the Catamount Community Forest in Williston, Vermont. This is a great opportunity to get out into the woods, enjoy the fall leaves, and improve your navigation skills. There will be points on both bike and foot – you can choose to do one or both sections.

This will be an excellent event for those looking to experiment with aspects of adventure racing. For more experienced teams, this will be an opportunity to push hard and hone skills. You’ll have more than a week to participate, at whatever time is convenient to you. Check out the details.

2020 Bitter Pill Update

It has become apparent that we simply will not be able to host the Bitter Pill this year. Try as we might, aligning a suitable location, dinner plan, transition areas, etc., all while maintaining reasonable distancing – while also having places for enough people to stay…well, safe to say that while perhaps possible, it isn’t likely, won’t be as much fun, and is extremely difficult to commit to while the future is still so uncertain.

We regret it. We wish things were in a different place and that we could give many of you an opportunity to see each other and get out in the wilderness in a unique way, but that will have to wait for next year. (Good news – we’re now really far ahead on planning for our 2021 race!)

We are talking about what we can provide to people. We might consider hanging some orienteering flags in remote places and having timed competitions where you drop in at your leisure. We’ll see. If you have idea, or want to help, let us know!

Thanks for understanding,
The GMARA Crew

2020 GMARA Race Schedule Update

We’ve been receiving a lot of email lately about the 2020 race schedule, particularly since the Frigid Infliction is typically just around the corner in early March. For those looking for the regular crop of GMARA events, this will be a good news, bad news post.

First the bad news. We will not be hosting the Frigid Infliction this year. There’s lots of reasons for this, but the primary reason is the simplest. We don’t want to host an event that has risk of not being excellent. Based on how things were (or weren’t) coming together, we’re going to take a year off. On the plus side, there’s a Saturday morning coming up soon where we’ll get to all sleep in significantly later than we would have otherwise.

We may still host a fun event at the Catamount Town Forest in lieu of the race; we’re bouncing ideas around for that now. Let us know if you want to help out! This would be a great way to get involved.

On the good news side, we’re well ahead of planning and course design for the 2020 Bitter Pill adventure race! We’re excited to bring the event to Lyndonville, Vermont, on August 8th. New terrain across all three disciplines? Check! So much good stuff to choose from out there; we’re looking forward to the springtime and getting out there and continuing the testing. It may be challenging to beat last year’s back woods swamp bike leg of the race, but rest assured you’ll see some amazing things. The 2020 edition will be a USARA regional qualifier.

Let us know if you have any questions or would like to volunteer in any capacity. GMARA keeps running due to everyone chipping in to help bring unique adventure in the woods of Vermont.

Bitter Pill Team Update #3

We’re just a few short days away!

We’ve closed registration (congrats to one team squeaking in under the wire) and are putting the finishing touches on everything.

A few notes to pay attention to:

– Registration closes at 9pm Friday evening. Normally we can extend this a bit but we’ll be more limited this time. If you are somehow delayed, please reach out to us via staff@gmara.org.
– The weather forecast looks like we may see some rain, particularly in the morning (it’s jumped from 20% to 40% today alone.) Be prepped.
– There is a parade in downtown Waterbury Saturday afternoon that may affect people joining you for dinner or picking you up. You can see a parade route here. While it shouldn’t affect racers (barring a really ‘creative’ aka ‘not at all viable what are you thinking’ aka ‘we’re really confused’ nav choice), pass the word along to anyone you know that might be affected.
– We have word back from our final course tester who ran through everything this past weekend (a few things several times!) We maaaaay have included just a little too much in this course. We’ve adjusted the instructions accordingly, particularly with some rain coming, but you’ll want to pay close attention to both your instructions and at the pre-race briefing.
– And yes, you really need to take your bike through that. Really. Not kidding. Remember you read this. Foreshadowing and all that.

Any final questions, hit us up. We’ll see you in a few days!

Cheers,
The GMARA Crew