Crazy Mountain 100 Course Guide

The climbs and the high point: Conical Peak

The whole day is built on big, steep climbs, and the centerpiece is the long haul up and over Conical Peak, the high point of the course up near 10,200 feet, which you hit somewhere around the middle of the race. The vert here does not come in gentle, runnable grades. It comes in abrupt walls where you are hiking with your hands on your knees, gaining altitude fast. Pace these by effort and by breathing, not by any flat-ground number, because the altitude makes every grade feel harder than it is.

Up high you are exposed. Above treeline the navigation can come down to spotting the next cairn, and the weather can turn on you in minutes. Know your map, keep an eye on the sky, and do not dawdle up top when a storm is building. The runners who do well here are patient on the climbs and efficient with their hiking, so they crest each high point with something left for the descent.

The descents and the off-trail sections

What goes up comes down hard. The descents are steep and genuinely technical, on scree and rough ground that beats up your quads and asks for real attention with every step. Then add the off-trail stretches, where there is no tread to follow and you are picking a line across a ridge or a basin by the cairns. This is slow, focused running even when your legs feel good, and it is where time quietly disappears.

Practice steep, technical descending and rough off-trail travel before you toe this line. Being able to keep moving safely downhill on scree late in the race, when your quads are cooked and the light is going, is what separates a finish from a long, painful walk to the next aid. If you only train smooth trail, the Crazies will expose it.

The long aid gaps, the night, and the late-race lows

The aid stations are spread out, and some gaps run past 13 miles through remote, high terrain, so you have to be self-sufficient between them. Cow Camp is the one you hit twice, first on the way out and again after the big loop up and over Conical Peak, and it has become a legend of this race. Carry enough food, fluid, and warm layers to cover the long carries, because the next aid is not close and the weather can change while you are out there.

Then there is the night. Most runners are out for a long time, often well past 24 hours, which means a full night of moving over hard ground by headlamp. The lows tend to hit in the small hours, when it is cold, you are tired, and the trail keeps climbing. Have a plan for it: keep eating, keep your core warm, break the course into aid-to-aid chunks, and lean on a pacer through the dark where the rules allow one. The race is often won or lost not on the big climbs but in how you handle the quiet, cold, low-morale hours before dawn.

Crew, drop bags, and pacers on private land

Because the course threads private ranches and remote forest, crew access is limited and it changes year to year. Some aid stations are crew-friendly and some are not (in 2026, for instance, the Huntin Camp aid station near mile 93 had no crew access). Build your logistics around that reality. Use drop bags for the stations your crew cannot reach, and make sure a headlamp, spare batteries, warm layers, and your night nutrition are in the bags that land before dark.

Where pacers are allowed, having someone with you for the night section is a huge help on a course this isolated. Confirm the current crew, pacer, and drop bag rules on the official race site, then map your plan to exactly which stations your people can actually get to.

Pace the climbs by grade, not by the watch

Your flat-ground pace is meaningless on the walls in this race. What matters is your effort up the grade, so hold an output you can sustain and hike the steep pitches efficiently without feeling like you are losing the race. The classic mistake on a course like this is pushing the early climbs because you feel fresh, then paying for it on the technical descents and through the night. Use a grade-adjusted pace to turn your real fitness into honest climbing and descending targets so you do not torch your legs in the first half.

Build a vert-aware finish prediction and work back into the cutoffs

Do not guess your Crazy Mountain finish off a road or a smooth-trail 100. The 23,000 feet of climb, the scree, the off-trail navigation, and the altitude all add real time, and the 36 hour cutoff plus the intermittent cutoffs leave less margin than the number suggests. A vert-aware finish prediction that accounts for this course gives you a realistic window, and from there you can work back into each cutoff, especially the hard one up high near Conical Pass, so you know exactly how much buffer you are carrying at every checkpoint instead of guessing in the dark.

Carbs: steady, trained, and through the night

For an effort this long, target roughly 60 to 90 grams of carbohydrate per hour, leaning to the higher end only if your gut is trained to handle it. A glucose-plus-fructose blend lets you absorb more than a single sugar can. The hard part here is not the daytime, it is the small hours, when your appetite is gone but your engine still needs fuel. Rehearse your exact hourly carb number on big back-to-back long runs, and practice eating when you are tired, so race night is execution and not an experiment.

Sodium and fluid: built for the long carries and the altitude

Bias your sodium toward the high end, often around 500 to 700 milligrams per liter of fluid, and more if you are a heavy or salty sweater. Just as important on this course, carry enough food and fluid to cover the long gaps between aid, some of which run past 13 miles through high, exposed terrain. Cramps, a sloshy stomach, and that hollow wrung-out late-race feeling are usually fluid and sodium problems, not fitness problems. Weigh yourself before and after a hard long run to find your real sweat rate, then build the plan around your own number.