Cocodona 250's sixth edition starts at 4:30am Mountain Time on Monday from Black Canyon City, sending around 200 ultrarunners north on a 252.9-mile point-to-point traverse that ends inside Flagstaff city limits before the 10am cutoff on Saturday 9 May. Aravaipa Running has confirmed 125 hours of continuous YouTube coverage from Mountain Outpost, broken into 16 dedicated streams that pass the broadcast between aid stations as runners move through the night. The course climbs from the saguaros of the Sonoran Desert through Crown King and Prescott into the ponderosa pines around Mingus Mountain, hits a long high-elevation traverse through Sedona's red rock and finishes on the Arizona Trail just below the San Francisco Peaks.
The headline name is Courtney Dauwalter, returning to the start line after winning the Chianti Ultra Trail by UTMB in March in her first European outing of 2026. Dauwalter has not raced Cocodona since her 2022 win, when she set a women's course record that has stood through three editions; her stated goal this year, repeated in the Aravaipa pre-race media call on Wednesday, is to "let the course decide" rather than to chase the time. The current women's record sits with Rachel Entrekin from her 2024 victory, and Entrekin is back in the field this year for what shapes up as the deepest women's Cocodona ever assembled.
The men's race centres on Joe McConaughy, the 2023 winner who returns after a year off the 250-mile distance, and Michael Versteeg, the inaugural 2021 men's champion who has been racing 100k and 100-mile distances steadily through the build-up. Versteeg's local knowledge is unmatched among the elite contenders — he has run on the Cocodona route in training every spring since the inaugural edition — while McConaughy will start the race off a confirmed sub-two-week taper after a strong Black Canyon 100k spring. Aravaipa's tracking page lists 14 men under a 70-hour finish projection, which would put each of them ahead of last year's third-place finish.
Course conditions look favourable. The National Weather Service forecast for the corridor between Black Canyon City and Flagstaff calls for daytime highs in the low 90s on Monday and Tuesday in the southern desert sections, dropping into the 60s and 70s above 6,000 feet from Wednesday onwards. Overnight lows on Mingus Mountain and the Mogollon Rim are expected to fall into the upper 30s by Friday night, the kind of fast-moving temperature swing that has historically separated finishers from drop-outs at miles 130 to 180. Aravaipa has reopened its drop-bag service at six aid stations this year and added a mandatory headlamp check at the Crown King turn-around.
For livestream viewers the relevant times are well-defined. The men's leaders are expected to reach the Crown King mile 38 cutoff at around 5pm on Monday and the Mingus Mountain mile 100 station before sunrise on Tuesday. The women's leaders are projected to clear Crown King by 7pm Monday with Sedona's mile 167 station likely between 8 and 11pm on Wednesday. The course-record line for the men — Mike McKnight's 65 hours 33 minutes from 2024 — would put a finisher into Flagstaff at around 10:00pm on Wednesday, while Dauwalter's 2022 women's mark of 71 hours 54 minutes corresponds to a Thursday morning arrival. Aravaipa's tracking page goes live at 4am Pacific on Monday.