Turtle Race at Hi Desert Roundup 2010...

If life in the slow lane sounds like a good thing, than the Turtle Race at the 39th Hi-Desert Roundup might be your cup of tea. The object of this "race" is to run a course of approximately a quarter mile as slow as possible, without stopping. This isn't as easy as it sounds, as the sponsors of this event, the Hemet Jeep Club, included a nasty climb up a pile of rocks, designed to weed out any vehicle who doesn't have low, low gears. I'm told to successfully complete this race it helps to have a crawl ratio of something like 500:1, so with the 83:1 ratio my truck has, I wouldn't be much of a contender. But I love the event, I love the scenery, and I love to take photos, so I'm always a happy camper when I watch the race.

Enjoy the photos I took of the Turtle Race!

Photo: Here's the start of the race, as a participant gets registered and the volunteer reads the rules of the race.

Photo: This highly modified Jeep effortlessly climbed the hill, which is a lot harder than it looks. This Jeep must have a 500:1 or better crawl ratio, as a snail could have climbed the hill faster than this guy was going.

Photo: Going up the rough hill. You have to climb as slowly as possible, and if you stop for any reason, you're out of the race. This guy didn't stop, but you could barely seem him crawling, as he was going so slowly.

Photo: This beautiful CJ-5 almost made it up the hill, but stalled on the boulders at the bottom, and was eliminated from the race.

Photo: This guy had no trouble negotiating the steep, rough hill.

The Hemet boys made the course quite rough and interesting, with one short, steep, loose climb, that was peppered with many loose boulders to negotiate, which definitely separated the tortoises from the hares. Many a Jeep met their match on this hill... it wasn't that hard, but it was very hard to negotiate without stopping, and if you stopped for any reason, the race was over for you.

I'm told that the winning time to run the quarter mile course is in the neighborhood of forty minutes. Now that's a Turtle Race!