The first Land Rover G4 Challenge finished at the weekend. Brian Byrne joins an Irish stonemason for the event's last leg through the desert canyons of Utah.
Just over a month ago, 16 adventurers began an odyssey that took them to four locations around the world competing for the prize of a new Range Rover. Last weekend Belgian fighter pilot Rudi Thoelen won the first Land Rover G4 Challenge at the end of the last leg in the US.
Dingle stonemason Paul McCarthy was sixth. "It was a chance to go around the world - I completely enjoyed that," he told me when I joined him for the final leg of the Land Rover G4 Global Challenge in southern Utah.
This attitude gained for Ireland's competitor a reputation among his fellow competitors from 15 other countries as the laid-back Irishman who didn't put extreme competitiveness first. Taking part, as they say, was more important than anything.
How he took part kept McCarthy in the upper levels of the competition right through to the final day. And, when I joined him last week, he had proved his place as a true sporting ambassador for Ireland, first in the snowy Catskills in New York State and beyond, then across South Africa - and then into some of the toughest territory of Western Australia.
Now it was against the awesome background of Utah's canyon lands that he would further show outdoor skills old and new, in the race for points towards the first winner for the 2003 inaugural event, the first of its kind to be sponsored by Land Rover since it pulled out of the famous Camel event in 1998.
Sitting behind him and his team-mate for the Utah leg, Kitt Stringer from Canada, in their Discovery, I understood just how difficult this land must have been for the Conostega wagons of the old Wild West.
It was tough enough in the Discovery to travel some of the "trails" through the canyons, up along their walls and down from the tops of the sandstone buttes, which were as ropey as they come - and, for this writer with a well-embedded fear of sheer drops, absolutely terrifying.
But the cars, and the contestants driving them, followed by their Land Rover support teams, rarely so much as hiccupped in the tough terrain. I understand, however, that Australia took its toll of a few Range Rovers which were driven harder than they would ever be in normal life.
For Paul McCarthy, from Ventry, Co Kerry, and his colleagues, it was both a series of feats of endurance and a willingness to do things that most of us - certainly this writer - just would not countenance.
Climbing sheer cliffs and abseiling and bungee-jumping are high, literally, on that list. Less fearful are kayaking - on locations as diverse as Sydney Harbour and the Colorado River - and mountain-biking and running, neither of which last Paul had done before. No more than he had climbed before, but he found he had an aptitude for that.
Running caused him problems, re-awakening an old knee injury from surfing at Dingle. On the other hand, when required to run on rocky terrain, his experience of jumping across rocky Kerry shorelines paid off to the extent that he regularly overtook more experienced competitors on these events.
The contestants were required each day to use navigational skills to drive to a series of "Hunters", locations where they then had to carry out a task that might involve any one, or a combination of the tasks mentioned above. They gained individual points for time they took to do the tasks, and for their success in predicting each morning whether they would be the first, second, third and so on team to arrive at each location.
Driving time between locations in many cases, in my Utah experience, could be as long as three hours. And they had to get to a new camp location each evening by a set time, or lose all the points they'd gained for the day.
It was also an exercise in working as teams, as each contestant paired with a different competitor for each leg. Beginning with the US east coast leg, McCarthy had worked with British, German, and American contestants before teaming with Stringer.
Sitting behind them was an education in personality examination, as they drove from Las Vegas to Snow Canyon in Utah, from there to the Pink Coral Sands National Park where we were snowed on, then to Bryce Canyon where we lost time by taking a wrong turn, but saw part of the canyon's marvellous facilities as compensation, and then across through the Escalante Grand Staircase to Lake Powell, finally ending up near Moab, the "Adventure Capital of America." The whole sequence represents a hell of a long journey in five days.
It was also a smelly one. Paul had warned me that by Thursday the vehicle would stink to high heaven, from sweaty socks, discarded fruit remains and general lack of showering. He was wrong. It was Wednesday.
As for the personalities, Stringer was by nature very competitive, and reacted in a confrontational way when others didn't do things straighforwardly. McCarthy would simply not let that kind of thing bother him.
"Listen, they're just storing up bad karma for themselves," he said on one occasion. "Sure," Stringer retorted, "but maybe I'm their karma, and I should beat the shit out of them."
Anyway, it was an extraordinary journey for me to participate in, even if only for the last quarter. Truth to tell, it was enough, because sleeping in my own G4 Igloo tent reminded me of all the reasons why I gave up camping about 30 years ago.