Just before the turnoff to this strip of road, there is a sign warning that the road is primitive and unmaintained. The warning is for vehicles, of course. In places it was a bit of a challenge for me to drive my Buick through this, as I rarely went faster than five miles an hour, usually slower. There were three places I had to drive through shallow stream crossings.

Although the road is much narrower here, it's never too narrow for two cars to get by one another on an encounter. On two or three occasions, I saw a car coming, and just pulled to the right to let the other person through, just to make things safe.

The road may be tough for cars, but it's almost ideal for runners, the sort of surface that the majority of runners most crave to be on. I wish I had a road like this right by my home to train on. By trail racing standards, it's very tame stuff. Despite its status as a tough race because of the elevation gain, Whiskey Row is, after all, a road marathon, not a trail race.