On August 10, 2024, the twenty-fourth annual Emperor’s Challenge will be taking place.
Which is still a ways off, but if you’re thinking about running it, you’ve only got a few weeks until registration, which opens April 7 at 12:01 am.
Manda Maggs is on the Emperor’s Challenge Planning Committee. She says last year, they staggered the registration, which worked really well, so they’re doing that again. “If you’ve been doing the race for 20 years or more, you get to register three days early,” says Maggs. “If you’ve run it for more than 10 years, you can register two days early, and if you’ve done it for more than five years, you can register one day early.”
One of the big changes coming up for the committee is the fact that Quintette is soon to be an active mining site again. Indeed, as of earlier this year, they were basically convinced that this was going to be the last year. “We were warned because of the increased activity happening out at Quintette, we were going to have to put some pretty significant thought towards a new route starting next year,” says Manda. “We’ve been talking to them lots and they’ve been pretty clear that they really don’t want to disrupt the Emperor’s Challenge. But of course, there’s really not much other way to get around it. We can’t run the race on an active mine site. It’s a serious safety issue. Looking at their five-year plan this year, the Emperor’s challenge route won’t be impacted significantly, because they’re not going to be anywhere near where the route is running.”
At first, the group thought the route would have to change for 2025, but that’s not necessarily the case anymore. “Now we’re thinking that we might get a few more years out of this race route,” she says. “That gives us more time to look at other options if we have to change the route. It gives us a lot more time to go out and check some other routes.”
It doesn’t hurt, says Maggs, that this year, someone from Conuma is on the Emperor’s challenge committee. “That’s making things a lot easier for coordinating and communicating,” she says. “It’s great. Conuma has guaranteed us they won’t leave the Wolverine Nordic and Mountain Society (WNMS) out to dry. They’re very clear that if we do have to change things, they’ll do what they can. They’ve already offered support to help out with their LiDAR data and their GIS guy and help map new routes. That’s a big thing. We now have more time, and we have some resources that WNMS didn’t have at it’s disposal before. We’re pretty confident that we can make this work.”
If the route has to change, it won’t be the first time. Indeed, the current route is version 3.5 of the race.
Originally, the Emperor’s Challenge went up and over Mount Roman (from which the Challenge gets its name). While it was still on Roman, Northern Energy and Mines (NEMI) began work on the Peace River Coal Mine, which forced a reroute to avoid industrial activity. So in 2006, the route shifted, going up the infamous Mathews Gully (named after race founder and local doctor Nigel Mathews)
As that mine grew, it became unfeasible to continue on Mount Roman, and the route was moved across the valley to Babcock Mountain.
The Babcock route has been tweaked a few times, but the most problematic section was near the start. After about two kilometres of running along a road, the race left the road and headed onto an ever-narrowing trail. With as many as 800 people starting the race, it meant that this section became a bottleneck.
So in 2020, the Emperor’s Challenge Committee changed the route. Instead of following the trail through the Boulder Gardens parking lot, the new route keeps on the road for another 1.3 km, and when it finally leaves the road, climbs steeply uphill along a newly built singletrack trail.
After another few kilometres, the route re-joins the original route, which circles around the summit of Babcock.
So, says Maggs, changing routes is not something new for the race. “We’ve talked to a lot of people, like Charles Helm (one of a handful of people who has done the race every year) and Birgit and Kevin Sharmin (Birgit contracted Covid right before the 2022 race and so missed one race; she was also on the planning committee for many years). They have weighed in and there’s definitely options out there. Not every single one of them is ideal, but if we’re going to have to change things, we may as well consider all of our options. We’re going to look at things like just skirting around where the mine is going to be, but also look at moving it to another mountain. We’re considering just about anything at this point and looking forward to this summer when we can go out and actually walk some of these places and take a closer look at the options on the ground.”
Just before the race was put on hiatus for two years due to Covid, the thousand person race was filling up in four hours, but for the last few years, interest has cooled.
Maggs says that’s common across the sector. “I have some friends that do adventure races elsewhere, say down in the Okanagan and in the Lower Mainland, and from what I’ve heard, it’s pretty consistently down everywhere.”
The good news is, it’s recovering. “The first year after Covid, we had about 600 participants, which is a lot less than our normal thousand. Last year we had over 800 people register. This year, we’re expecting to have over 800 again, and maybe get closer to a full race. From what we’ve been able to see, though, it’s not at all unusual that numbers are down. It’s just kind of the way it is. I don’t know if that’s because people got out of condition during Covid, or if it’s because those sort of large gatherings aren’t as appealing as they once were.”
Maggs says the big new thing for this year is having teams this year. “It’s not really going to affect the main race at all, and everyone will still get their individual results, but it’s just a kind of a friendly way for some groups to challenge each other. This year, Conuma is actually going to have different teams from their three mine sites challenging each other.”
It also means that the local emergency services like the RCMP, the Tumbler Ridge Fire Department and Tumbler Ridge Search and Rescue—which for the last two years have held their own race within a race—will be able to track their results officially. “There will also be an open category,” says Maggs. “If you want to register as a team, your team captain should be the first person to register and then they register their group. If my co-workers at the geopark wanted to form a team and challenge the museum for example, we could do that under the general category.”
While she’s not worried about people signing up for the race, Maggs says there is a great need for volunteers. “This year, we know that so the Canadian Rangers and the Junior Rangers have a training camp the same day, so we’re going to need lots of people to help out with parking and possibly the kids race,” she says. “People can email us if they want to volunteer. We’re looking for people to work with both in the planning and on the day of the event to help out with logistics.
For more information, visit www.emperorschallenge.com or search for the race on Facebook. To volunteer, send an email to contact@wnms.ca.
Above photo from the 2023 Archives
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.