Superior Fall Trail Race

The Superior Fall Trail Race runs 100 miles, 50 miles and a marathon along the Superior Hiking Trail through the Sawtooth Mountains of far northeastern Minnesota. All three are point to point and all three finish at Caribou Highlands Lodge on Lutsen Mountain. The course is about 95 percent technical singletrack, parallels Lake Superior, and climbs to near 2,000-foot summits between river crossings and boreal forest.

The 100 has run since 1991 and holds a 38-hour cutoff, which is also the standard that makes a finish a Western States 100 qualifier. Entry to all three distances is by a lottery held each January; the race stopped selling places first come after 2015, when it filled in hours.

The 100 starts at Gooseberry Falls State Park and covers 102.9 miles to Lutsen with 17,350 feet of climbing and the same again of descent, across 13 aid stations. The 50 starts the next morning at the Finland Community Center and runs 51.7 miles with 7,950 feet of climbing across 7 aid stations, sharing the closing miles of the 100's course.

Both races close at the same moment: the schedule puts last finishers at 10:00 p.m. on the Saturday, which is 38 hours after the 100 starts and 16 hours 45 minutes after the 50 does. The organiser publishes an all-time results table for each distance, aid-station splits for the 100 by year, and a records page listing course records and the runners with the most finishes.

Entry is by lottery for all three distances, and the lottery has a gate in front of it: to enter the 100 you must already have finished a 50-mile or longer trail race, and to enter the 50 a 50 km or longer one. The application window runs for 15 days each January and accepted entrants are charged and published to the start list within 10 days of it closing. Runners with five 100-mile finishes, ten 50-mile finishes, or the previous year's wins get in automatically. The race describes the switch to a lottery in its own words: the last conventional registration, in 2015, filled in hours and crashed its server.