Black Canyon Ultras (Hoka) 2027

Welcome to Arizona. Welcome to the Sonoran Desert. Welcome to one of the most fascinating trail races in the American Southwest 🌵.

Before becoming a world-renowned trail race, the Black Canyon National Recreation Trail didn’t see many runners 🏃‍♂️ pass through. The US Department of the Interior officially established it in 1919 as a livestock drive route; ranchers used it to move their sheep between Phoenix and the mountains of Bradshaw and Mingus, across 130 kilometers of arid desert 🌞. The trail also partly followed the old stagecoach route between Phoenix and Prescott 📍.

The history of the race distances is also a little serial drama worth dwelling on 🤓. Since the first edition in 2014, Aravaipa Running (the organization behind the event) has done quite a bit of trial and error to find the right formula ☝️. At first: a 100K and a 60K. In 2015, they even added an 18K for the “reasonable” runners—who have apparently vanished since. For years, the 100K + 60K format held strong, until in 2019, flooding forced a new course to be drawn and the race entered a new dimension 🤩. Then in 2025, the 60K took its bow to make way for a 50K. Today the race therefore offers two distances: the 50K (52 km in reality, because honesty has its limits in the ultra world 😅) and the 100K, or 100.3 km to be exact. Simple, clean, formidable 😎.

The course is entirely point-to-point, which in itself is already a promise of adventure: you start at Mayer High School in Spring Valley and head south, never turning back, all the way to Emery Henderson Trailhead near New River 💦. On paper, the profile has about 1,590 m of elevation gain for 2,236 m of descent over 100 km. Sounds nice—almost too nice 🙃. The official website itself makes a point of warning enthusiastic runners: the first twenty kilometers are fast, fun, and downhill, and that’s precisely where hundreds of runners burn their joker every year 😂. And in February in the Sonoran desert, you have to be ready for anything: freezing cold at the start, heat in the afternoon, a storm or snowfall in the evening ❄️. Arizona doesn’t do things halfway 😬.

What draws the best trail runners on the planet here: the Western States Golden Tickets. The top three men and top three women in the 100K automatically earn a direct entry to the Western States 100, the most legendary ultratrail race in the United States—the one whose entry lottery can take more than ten years to finally draw your number 🤹. It’s the Holy Grail of American trail running, and Black Canyon is one of the rare guaranteed gateways 😍. For everyone else, finishing the 100K in under 17 hours allows you to enter the Western States lottery 🇺🇸. The records on the current course give an idea of the level lining up at the start: Hans Troyer completed the 100K in 7h 20 min 00 in 2026, Jennifer Lichter in 7h 57 min 05 that same year. For the mathematicians in the back: that’s about 7 minutes per kilometer. Over 100K. In the desert 🥵.

To finish with a few verified gems that really deserve to be known: the giant saguaros you pass all along the course can live up to 200 years and don’t grow their first arms until around age 75 🤯. The ones watching you suffer at kilometer 90 were already there before World War I—a little humility is in order 🤫. The trail also crosses active grazing areas with cows 🐄, and the race’s official rules explicitly state that you must close livestock gates behind you, because a loose cow on the trail is a problem even the best Hoka shoes can’t solve 👟. And as for the recreational shooting areas around Table Mesa, don’t worry: the ranges are secured far from the trail. But hearing shots echo in the desert as night falls does help you keep the pace, no denying it 🔫.

Black Canyon Ultras is all of that at once: a race with a real historical soul, a course that never lies about its difficulty, an atmosphere that unapologetically mixes elites hunting a Golden Ticket 🎫 with finishers who are going to spend 19 hours on their feet with a headlamp to earn their medal 🥇.