The Broken Arrow Skyrace returned to Palisades Tahoe on Friday, opening its three-day mountain-running festival with the short, savage Ascent and bringing the Golden Trail World Series back onto American soil. Set in the high country above Olympic Valley, California, the event has established itself as the premier trail-running gathering in the United States, and this year’s edition again draws a field that mixes World Series regulars, domestic specialists and a large recreational entry across its eight distances.
Friday’s Ascent is the festival’s sharpest test of pure climbing, a near-vertical effort that hauls runners up the ski resort’s slopes to a high point on the ridgeline. Run almost entirely uphill and at altitude, it rewards a narrow set of skills—raw power, lungs accustomed to thin air and the nerve to hold a brutal effort from the gun—and serves as an early marker of form before the weekend’s longer races. Lingering snow on the upper slopes is a recurring feature of the early-summer date and adds a further complication for the leaders.
The centrepiece, however, comes on Sunday with the 23K, the distance that carries Golden Trail World Series points and the bulk of the prize money. The Broken Arrow 23K has grown into one of the deepest one-day trail fields assembled anywhere outside the European classics, and organisers have again leaned into the event’s status with a record purse that underscores trail running’s slow march toward financial parity with the roads and the track.
Among the men, Moroccan climber Elhousine Elazzaoui arrives as one of the headline names for the 23K, fresh from a strong spring on the World Series circuit, and he leads a cast of contenders drawn from across Europe and North America. The women’s race is similarly stacked, with the altitude, the technical descents and the punchy climbs of the Palisades course all but guaranteeing that the result will turn on more than leg speed alone.
Beyond the elite competition, Broken Arrow’s appeal lies in the festival atmosphere it has cultivated—multiple races for every level, a vertical kilometre, a 46K and a 100K among them, and a base-area village that keeps spectators close to the action. As the Golden Trail World Series reaches its lone American stop, the weekend offers a rare chance for domestic fans to watch the sport’s leading mountain runners up close. The Ascent has set the tone; the 23K on Sunday will decide the weekend.