Rebelle Rally Stage 3: Marathon Leg Proves Tough for Everyone

Photo: Courtesy of Rebelle Rally

Competitors woke early from their self-camp night to start the second half of the marathon leg of the seventh annual Rebelle Rally, a 1600 mile, all-women’s offroad navigational rally taking place this week in the Nevada and California desert. Teams spent Sunday night at Fish Lake Valley Hot Springs where they camped without the support of the Rebelle staff, mechanics or a comfortable base camp.

Stage 3 of the Rebelle Rally took competitors to the edge of Death Valley. There, teams had to choose between a more challenging X path, where they faced steep and technical trails that took them high above the Owens Valley, or a less challenging path to an On-Route Enduro through the Alabama Hills, near Lone Pine, California. Alabama Hills is a famous movie and car commercial location that’s been used in numerous films since the 1920s. The boulder and sand landscape played the backdrop to modern movies like Django Unchained, and Iron Man, and competitors spent the day finding checkpoints in the area and moving south towards Dove Springs and Base Camp 2, where they will stay on Monday night.

Photo: Courtesy of Rebelle Rally

An On-Route Enduro requires competitors to use traditional rally roadbooks, complete with pictograms and tulip directions for Rebelles to decipher. Checkpoints are located along the path and accuracy is key.

Because Fish Lake Valley Hot Springs was so remote, there was no live broadcast on Monday morning as competitors rolled out, but the evening broadcast from Base Camp 2 showed plenty of dramatic weather as the wind picked up and lightning flashed across the sky.

Team 158, driving a 2018 Rubicon Jeep Wrangler JLU, crossed the finish line and showed off what they thought to be a weather balloon they found on the trail during Monday evening’s Live Show and mentioned that they saw everything from rainbows to hail while making their way to Base Camp 2. Team 187, one of the three Rivian factory teams, with Rivian employees Lily Marcaruso and Alex Anderson behind the wheel, got a flat on Stage 3 and changed their tire in four minutes, according to Macaruso.

Photo: Courtesy of Rebelle Rally

Since teams spent the night off the grid, they had no insight into how they placed on Stage 3, but scoring showed that in the 4×4 Group A, a total 16 teams were charged penalties, including Team 150, the Ford-backed team consisting of Shelby Hall and Penny Dale. It’s currently not clear how or why those penalties happened, but penalties can be assessed for a variety of reasons, including everything from speeding or widely missing a checkpoint to needing mechanical assistance from Rebelle staff on the trail.

Rori Lewis from the Total Chaos Fabrication team, Team 154, echoed what a lot of competitors were feeling after a tough day on the trail. “Beautiful terrain! Great driving! My navigator is amazing! But let’s just say typical Day… Freakin… Three… If you want to get the definition of ‘Day 3,’ it’s when anything goes wrong. Everything goes wrong. Every competitor in the Rebelle has had a rough day, but hopefully, everybody keeps a good head and moves past it into Day 4.”

Photo: Courtesy of Rebelle Rally

Competitors are broken into Group A, Group B, and Group C. Group A and B consist of 4×4 teams, while Group C is the X-Cross Group. Scoring Director Chrissie Beavis — who is a world-class rally navigator and driver, a former X Games gold medalist and team mates with Tanner Foust — is the mastermind behind the scoring and says that breaking the large 4×4 class into two sets helps prevent competitors from following one another on the trail. As Emily Miller, the founder of the Rebelle, says, it also gives everyone the opportunity to run their own Rally.

In Group A, the powerhouse Jeep-backed Team 129 of Nena Barlow and Teralin Petereit got a 10-point penalty, placing them second to privateer and experienced Rebelles, Team 188 with Laura Wanlass and Maria Guitar winning Stage 3 with a total of 201 points. In Group B, Team 137 made up of Michelle Kerby and Tasha Krug were the top scorers in Stage 2 with a total of 180 points.

Photo: Courtesy of Rebelle Rally

At the end of Stage 3, the Ford-backed Team 200 of Chris Benzie (who happens to be an semi-retired aerospace engineering executive) and Melissa Clark (the 2021 X-Cross winner and Bronco Moab Off-Roadeo Trail Guide) won the stage in the X-Cross class, in their 2022 Ford Bronco Sport Badlands, collecting 209 points on the day. Team 216 of Lyn Woodward and Sedona Blinson followed, collecting 188 points. The X-Cross class also struggled with penalties on Stage 3, with four of the teams receiving penalty points and three of the teams getting back to base camp after the close of the day. Team 177, who do not have a team bio on the Rebelle site, came in third in the X-Cross class, with the Kia-backed team, Team 206 of Verena Mei and Tana White coming in fourth.

Photo: Courtesy of Rebelle Rally

Mei and White lost a sensor on their Terratrip rally computer during Stage 1 of the Rally, and White, the navigator, has been doing manual math and using the vehicle odometer to figure out where the team is on the trail. Relying on paper maps, a list of latitude and longitude checkpoints, map tools and an odometer is what makes the Rebelle Rally so incredibly challenging. Losing your rally computer which, once dialed in (even if it is exceedingly temperamental) early in the event, makes scoring points even more difficult.

“[Saturday] our Terra Trip died, we lost our sensor, so we ended up timing out of a lot of checkpoints. I was expecting to be way better yesterday than we were,” White said. “We had a rockstar morning and then bombed it in the afternoon. Last night, our engineer friends gave us some math to figure out our distance, so I just did math all day today. Every distance we had today, I had to multiply our odometer reading from the car and figure out our location. It felt amazing, I felt like I had my groove back.”

We’ll have to wait and see how Stage 4 shakes out as the competitors head out from Dove Springs on Tuesday morning.

Photo: Courtesy of Rebelle Rally

Photo: Courtesy of Rebelle Rally

Photo: Courtesy of Rebelle Rally

Photo: Courtesy of Rebelle Rally

Photo: Courtesy of Rebelle Rally