Runners from 11 countries converged on the slopes above Hoodsport this month to tackle a 15-mile course that gained 5,300 vertical feet on the way to the summit of Mount Ellinor, marking Washington's first-ever stop on international skyrunning's premier circuit. The Beast of Big Creek, long a fixture of Pacific Northwest trail culture since its founding in 2009, suddenly found itself hosting some of the sport's biggest names as the second of four stops on the relaunched Skyrunner USA series.
The race, held within Olympic National Forest under a Special Use Permit issued by the U.S. Forest Service, is organized locally by Rock Candy Running. As reported by The Seattle Times, the event carried a purse of 100,000 euros, or roughly $117,000, drawing elite athletes who normally compete an ocean or two away. Co-race director Mathias Eichler said the event helps market the sport and unite the trail-running community, according to the paper's reporting by outdoors reporter Gregory Scruggs.
A Peruvian Runner's Three-Day Journey
Among the field was José Manuel Quispe, a 38-year-old Peruvian runner and the current Skyrunner World Series men's leader heading into the race. Quispe lives at 11,000 feet above sea level and trains on peaks reaching 16,000 feet, according to the Times, and his trip to Hoodsport took three days, including a 20-hour bus ride from his village just to reach the airport in Lima.
Despite that grueling trek, Quispe was edged out by American runner Morgan Elliott, who finished in 2:05:27, defeating Quispe by a little over four minutes. The result vaulted Elliott, the only U.S. runner ranked in the world series men's top 25, up to third place on the overall leaderboard. Elliott is now targeting the Skymasters final, which will take place in November in Spain's Serra d'Espadà mountains and cover 42 kilometers of rocky climbs and narrow ridgelines. On the women's side, Eve Pannone, representing Team Brooks, won the race outright.
What Qualifies a Mountain for World Series Status
Skyrunning is defined as a subset of trail running focused on climbing over distance, often at high altitude, a discipline conceived by Italian mountaineer Marino Giacometti in the early 1990s. The Skyrunner World Series has existed since 2004, and the International Skyrunning Federation certifies the courses that carry its name. Official requirements call for races of at least 20 kilometers with a minimum of 1,300 meters of elevation gain and an average incline greater than 6 percent, standards Mount Ellinor's steep, direct summit trail comfortably clears.
Unlike mass-participation road races, skyrunning by design limits its fields to the low hundreds of competitors. Etienne Rodriguez, who spoke to the Times about the sport's expansion, said skyrunning is establishing a footprint in North America, but cautioned that the region's ridgelines cannot accommodate too many people. The 2026 season includes 19 races total, and this was the series' first North American stop since 2018, when it visited Big Sky, Montana.
A Sport Weighing Its Own Growth
The stakes behind that caution are considerable. The U.S. trail-running industry has grown 8 percent annually over the past five years, and Washington alone now hosts more than 200 competitive trail races each year. Series organizers have discussed expanding into a broader continental circuit that could eventually include Canada and Mexico, and other Pacific Northwest events are capitalizing on the same momentum: the La Sportiva Cirque Series returns to Crystal Mountain for a second consecutive year next month, and the Skeetawk Skyline Scramble is set for August 30 in Hatcher Pass, Alaska.
That growth trajectory echoes broader national trends. Outdoor recreation participation nationwide reached a record 183.2 million people in 2025, according to the Outdoor Industry Association, though the pace of growth slowed to 1.1 percent that year as the market approaches saturation. In Washington specifically, the state's forest health strategic plan, issued in January, is already grappling with how climate pressures like drought and heat intersect with rising demand on trails from the Olympic Peninsula to the Columbia Gorge.
Qualifying for the World Series Finals
To reach the season-ending Skymasters final in November, runners must complete four races within the series and post at least one top-20 finish, a bar that has produced past champions like Kilian Jornet, who has won the overall Skyrunner World Series title four times. The sport's relationship with bigger, more commercial mountain events has not always been smooth. U.S. race directors issued an open letter in 2017 refusing to pay fees to qualify their events for the UTMB system, a rival that has since grown into a commercial juggernaut. UTMB reported 30 million euros in revenue in 2025 and its flagship Chamonix race now draws roughly 100,000 athletes, spectators and industry insiders, dwarfing the intimate scale skyrunning still protects.
For a small Mason County community like Hoodsport, the race represented a rare moment of global visibility, though the same trailheads and mountain corridors have made local headlines for less celebratory reasons this year, including a homicide investigation that shook the area in the spring. Big Creek Campground, the race's starting point, is also known among endurance athletes as the launch point for the Cushman Six, a 23-mile route linking six Olympic peaks with 12,000 feet of total climbing, a route Eichler himself helped document during a self-supported run in 2020. Whether Mount Ellinor becomes a fixture on skyrunning's calendar or a one-time showcase, organizers say the sport's foothold in North America is still being built one steep ridge at a time.
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