2024 Daily Series: Prologue & Day 1

Tornadoes, dung fungus, and scaredy cows, OH MY

This is the second in a series of posts detailing our 2024 Rebelle Rally experience, day by grueling, incredible, hilarious day. Below is a transcript of a conversation we had about Day 0 (Prologue) and Day 1, which set the tone for our first few days of the rally -- dust, cows, and more dust and cows. (You can read our first post, about Pre-Tech and Tech Inspection, here.)

Melissa Vander Wilt: So I revisited my journal for Prologue…there's some funny stuff in here. [laughs] Like, my third-to-last bullet just says, “I forget.” So that’s great. Super helpful. I also noted that the night before Prologue, I dreamed of Dad, Grandpa George, Grandpa Les, and Uncle Clark [who used the Bronco on hunting trips way back in the day], which I took as a good omen...but which didn’t help me at all with math.

Rochelle Bovee: Or with remembering that third-to-last bullet.

MVW: With remembering anything! Good times.

RB: Okay, so Prologue. We left through the back of camp, went north through the ranch…

MVW: This was a big circle day, right? A big loop. [See the Rebelle's Prologue day course fly-over on Instagram!] There were 10 checkpoints and an Enduro. I remember being really grateful for Prologue this year – I mean, I'm always grateful for Prologue, but, like, especially this year, because do you remember the Enduro?

RB: Yeah, the Enduro was at the end of the day...

MVW: We fucked up the Enduro right out of the gate, because we set our clocks to timer instead of count-up, so they were counting down instead of up, and we were like NOOOOOOOO.

RB: How did we do this?!

MVW: No idea. And so this put more pressure on me to try to do math, which we all know is not my strong suit. I think we ended up with like 2 points out of 20, which wasn’t actually terrible, since it seeded us for the start line for the next day. So we had a later start time on Day 1, which is always kind of nice, because it gives me a little bit more time to plot on that first competition morning.

Yeah, I was not mathing well this day. I fucked up some of our close times, too. We had to skip 5/5X because we thought we’d timed out of them, but we hadn’t. Because addition is hard? Otherwise we’d have gotten all the CPs this day.

I also have a note here that I had salsa on my maps. Very important. We must have had breakfast burritos this day. We named one of the spots Salsa Mountain and another spot Spicy Flats.

RB: Is this the same day that you were plotting, and you had your 4-point magnifying glasses on and you were using the wrong map ruler, and Emily was sitting right there and you were like, well, this is a great start?

MVW: I don't remember that!

RB: You don't remember that? Really? You didn't journal that?

MVW: No! I must’ve blocked it out lol. So humiliating, looking like a moron in front of Emily. Maybe that’s my “I forgot” bullet point.

RB: I remember you were just, like, “Okay, brain, WE'RE DOING THIS THING NOW.”

MVW: Yeah, well. This is why we love Prologue day. Dust off the cobwebs.

Um, this was also the day that we somehow had too much power steering fluid, do you remember? And we had to siphon some out.

RB: I remember popping into the mechanics’ that night just to confirm that things were okay, with our 4WD and that knocking sound. How did we have too much fluid?!

MVW: Because the Bronco’s haunted. There's either not enough fluid because of a leak, or too much fluid. Never just right.

Wait, where'd you go? You froze for a sec.

RB: No, I was just being still. I was pondering fluids.

MVW: That should be our tagline. Team Roaming Wolves: Pondering Fluids.

RB: Fluids aren't usually an issue. Once upon a time with our old transmission it would get too hot and spew it out, but normally we run strong in the fluids game.

Okay, so…is that pretty much Prologue Day in a nutshell?

MVW: Um...I have written down that we got points on all of our blacks! We didn't wide miss or get zero on any of our black checkpoints that day, and 6 of our 10 CPs were blacks. Points on all of them, so that was bitchin’.

This was also the lunar crater day. That was fun.

RB: Yeah. It looks really cool on the satellite.

[Check out this awesome Rebelle drone shot on Instagram of the lunar crater CP!]

MVW: Did we go into the crater, or did we just go around it?

RB: We just went up to the edge, and then back down. I just remember how silty we were after just the first day...the Bronco was a whole other color.

MVW: Dust everywhere, always. I think that's it for Prologue...do you want to talk Day 1? Because we got 69% in our ‘69 Bronco! That was my first bullet point.

RB: Awesome.

MVW: Day 1, we were still in Twin Springs. [See Rebelle's Day 1 course fly-over on Instagram!] Apparently the course looked like an amoeba, because I drew it in my journal. Or it looks like a wonky fried egg. There were two loops; a big loop, and then there's the smaller loop there in the hills. This was the dry lake bed day!

RB: This was also the day we had our picnic with Woo [Technical Director Chris Woo], because we got selected for the surprise rig search. Jimmy said we were the "lucky winner" when we pulled up to the green CP and I was so confused.

MVW: Yes, yes! We got searched by Jimmy, and we told Woo about the bag of poo incident from ‘21. [A story for another time.]

RB: And Jimmy found my Tums roll in the back. He's like, I found your Tums! And I was like, leave them there, I know they're there! I know they're just rolling around, but I know they're back there.

MVW: This was right after we got a wide miss...what did we miss?

RB: We spent so much time trying to find CP4. We ended up pinging the tracker to find out where we were, because we couldn't find our road.

MVW: I was like hOw nAvIgAtE? This was also the day the tornado ripped through the Bronco, and we were dying from the dung fungus!

RB: I remember that! All I had time to say was, “TORNADO!” and it was blasting through the Bronco.

MVW: Yeah, because the windows were down, of course, because the AC didn't work. And we were like, “We’re dying! This is all just dung dust, so disgusting. We're breathing this.”

I also journaled “dumb cows running alongside while I cowboy yelled at them.” What does that mean? What even is cowboy yelling?

RB: We have GoPro footage of that!

MVW: Git along now, lil' doggies! Git along! I just remember it was so funny, because they kept running in front of us, and we're like, run AWAY, dummies! And we could only drive walking pace by them, so we were all, GO, COWS.

RB: They were so scared. It was the two mamas and their babies.

MVW: I was scared, too! There were a couple points where the cows were totally mean-mugging us. I remember we were like…slow roll, no eye contact...

But we did well on the Enduro this day! We got 16/20 points!

RB: I'll take it.

MVW: Yeah, this was a pretty good day. We got 136 of 198 points, so that's not terrible?

RB: We were 9th from the bottom out of all 60-some teams. We can do better than that! It's our fifth year. We need more hustle.

MVW: Speaking of hustle, this is cool…so, Time Control 1 on the Enduro, we were 14 seconds early. Time Control 2, we were 31 seconds late. Time Control 3, though, we were right on time! Full points. That’s so impressive, coming from 31 seconds late to then spot on! You really pulled that one out.

RB: I'm getting stressed out just thinking about what's to come…the mental math, the kilometers per hour and the distance left…

MVW: It's so fucking hard.

So, the last bullet point I wrote for Day 1 has zero context…it just says, in quotes, “I honked.” Honked at what? Do you remember?

RB: Was it the cows? "I honked." I don't honk at teams…it had to have been the cows.

MVW: Probably. Fucking cows.

Up next: Day 2, in which we left the Fallini ranchlands toward our first self-camp location. We saw a comet, Shelly may or may not have seen a badger, and we definitely didn't see shit during the Enduro because we were dusted out. Force majeure! Coming soon!