Before the Cannon Fires

This is Gold Rush Adventure Racing's "Dawn to Dusk" event — more than two decades of history, the biggest field the race has ever seen, and the first edition run entirely by a new race director, Greg Callas, who took the reins from the crew that had been putting it on since 1999. I got brought in a few months out to build the photo and video coverage, and what's followed has been one of the more interesting logistics puzzles I've worked through.

The problem with photographing something that has no path

Most events I shoot have a shape to them — a start, a route, a finish, all fixed ahead of time. This one doesn't. Gold Rush is a rogaine-style adventure race: teams get a map and a checkpoint passport, and it's entirely up to them which checkpoints they chase and in what order. Some checkpoints are mandatory, some aren't. Some teams will bike thirty miles; others closer to twenty. There's no pack to follow and no single moment when "the race" is happening in one place.

Greg put it well on one of our planning calls: you can predict that a team will eventually be at a checkpoint. You can't predict when, or by what path they'll get there.

“A shot list stops being a script you follow and starts being a set of coordinates you have to be patient at.”

The knot in the middle of the map

The single hardest thing to plan around is also the best shot of the day. Midway through the course, racers paddle out to Angel Island, and the first team to reach a particular checkpoint gets to fire a two-hundred-year-old cannon — something that might happen once, maybe twice, in the entire race. It isn't repeatable, it isn't schedulable, and the island is reachable only by boat.

The fix turned out to be one of the race's own safety boats. Greg is coordinating a media seat so whoever's covering the island can get out ahead of the fastest teams and back before the paddle leg wraps up. It's not the kind of thing you can plan from a spreadsheet — you plan for it by asking a lot of questions of someone who's actually run the course before.

Building a crew for a course that won't sit still

Between sponsor activations, mandatory gear checks, and checkpoints spread from the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge out to Muir Beach, this was never a one-camera job. I've brought on Sam Huff, who works with the race's kayak vendor and knows this stretch of water and trail better than almost anyone, to help split coverage between the water and the headlands.

There's a second project layered on top of race-day coverage, too: a short documentary. Beyond the highlight film, I wanted to sit down with Greg before race day and get some of the story behind the story — how he ended up taking over a race with two decades of history, what a local sea kayaking club taught him about welcoming beginners into the sport, and why he cut the race format from 24 hours down to 12. Stories like that are usually more interesting than anything that happens on the course itself.

It's also the same discipline I bring to a public agency's community event or a corporate summit: you can build a plan, a shot list, a schedule — and you should — but the actual value shows up in how fast that plan can bend once real people stop following it. An adventure race just makes the pattern impossible to ignore.

What's next

Checkpoints are still being finalized, the drone plan depends on a few land-use permissions, and I still don't fully know what September 19th is going to look like on the ground. That's fitting, for a race that runs on unpredictability by design.

Full case study, photos, and the highlight film to follow after race day.