Bear 100

The route

The Bear 100 starts at 6 a.m. on a Friday in late September at Hyrum Gibbons/Mount Logan Park in Logan, Utah, and finishes 100 miles later at Fish Haven, Idaho, on the shore of Bear Lake. It is a point-to-point course through the Wasatch-Cache and Caribou National Forests, almost all single-track and dirt double-track, with about 22,000 ft of climbing between roughly 5,000 and 9,200 ft.

The first climb, up toward Logan Peak, is the longest, and the shape repeats all day: climb a ridge, drop into a canyon, climb again. Finishers know the sequence of aid stations by heart: Leatham Hollow, Right Hand Fork, Temple Fork, Tony Grove at mile 52, Franklin Trailhead, the Logan River crossing, Beaver Mountain Lodge at mile 76, Gibson Basin, Beaver Creek, then Ranger Dip and the final drop to the lake.

The race is known for its fall color, red maples and yellow aspens through the canyons. The cutoff is 36 hours, 6 p.m. Saturday.

What the sculpture shows

The sculpture shows the Bear River Range as a long ridge system with Logan Canyon cutting through it and Bear Lake at the far end. The route is a single line running south to north, so nothing overlaps. At 100 miles the terrain is zoomed out: the many canyon climbs read as texture on a range rather than as individual peaks.