I feel like some of this has to do with the sport’s pace of growth. The Class IV roads are something locals are used to, but other people travelling from out of state may not be. They’re only roads in the very loosest sense of the word. Some of them are kinda what most people would probably expect: chunky dirt roads or rutted, muddy jeep trails.
But a lot of them are basically just very long rock gardens with lots of washed out sections. They can get dangerous pretty quickly, especially if a rider doesn’t know what to expect when they come up on a section (which at VO included large washed out gullies and drops of a few feet at a time with very narrow paths around). I think this kind of riding isn’t on a lot of people’s radar when they’re doing a gravel race.
This is a screen grab from Rooted Vermont’s overview that’s a pretty good representation. I couldn’t even begin to guess how many miles of this there were on the VO course, maybe 10-20? It’s honestly hard to recall.
