(Photo: Competitors in the 2019 Best Sapper Competition jump in the lake at Fort Leonard Wood’s Training Area 250 and swim across. Fifty teams are slated to compete in the 14th Best Sapper Competition to be held March 30 through April 1 at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.)

Fifty teams are slated to compete in the 14th Best Sapper Competition to be held March 30 through April 1 at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

Sappers will travel more than 50 miles in 50 hours throughout the rugged Ozarks during the grueling competition while carrying a ruck sack that weighs more than 80 pounds and competing in a variety of events, testing them to their mental and physical breaking point.

The engineers will compete on limited amounts of sleep and will have to complete a series of combat engineer tasks including, demolition and land navigation, as well as jumping out of a helicopter into a lake.

Spectators are invited to watch as Capt. Hilary Thomas and 1st Lt. Alyvia Orsini, both with the 21st Brigade Engineer Battalion, 3rd Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), make Army history by being the first all-female team to compete in the Best Sapper Competition.

For more information about the competition, visit the BSC website: home.army.mil/wood/index.php/units-tenants/USAES/ Sapper/BSC.