When I wrote a few months back that everything this season should be “easy” compared to last year, because we aren’t training for the Iditarod, I was banking on a normal winter. I was not taking into consideration the possibility that we could have another winter of impossibly difficult training conditions. In my mind, I just had to train dogs. I wasn’t thinking about grooming trails, watching the snow turn to ice and then spending my dog sledding hours hanging on for dear life, while races began postponing for the second year in a row. So much for easy.
December started off well. We had three snowstorms in a row that resulted in us getting on sleds. I was grooming trails as much as I was running dogs in mid-December, trying to get trails opened for training. But it turns out the hurry to open up trails was near-sighted—it warmed up and rained. I took out a 12-dog team, bounced off a rock, tipped over, and lost them. Luckily, Kendra was right behind me and the two of us chased that team a good mile before we found my team stopped because the sled bag had caught on a tree. Conditions only worsened after that. I continued to run smaller and smaller teams. The day after Christmas we ran tours on East Bearskin Lake. A team of six dogs could pull me and a guest on the lake no problem. The dogs could run anywhere they wanted with little snow to impede their progress, and at the start of the first run they almost took me and my guest up and over a dock, luckily veering around it just in time. We also had no handler that day, so my daughter Sylvia ran as co-driver on every tour with Matt and I, at one point charming our tour guest with Christmas carols along the way. That night it rained again, turning the lake to glare ice. We cancelled the next three tour dates.
At home we continued running 6-dog teams in training. I tried running a team with the snowmobile one day, but the snowmobile continuously overheated and I had to stop and let it cool down every 10 minutes. Finally, I tried to turn the team around in the middle of the trail, which resulted in Pinto getting loose. We crossed Brule River which was glare ice, and Pinto wouldn’t cross, so I had to leave the team, slide across the Brule in the dark, retrieve Pinto, haul him across the river ice, and let him run home loose in front of the team. Meanwhile, the snowmobile continued to overheat, beeping loudly and obnoxiously for low oil and for low gas. By the time I got home, I vowed to never run dogs with the snowmobile again.
The Gunflint Mail Run was postponed, so Matt and I signed up for a race in Upper Michigan called the Tahquemenon—a two-day stage race. Reportedly they had plenty of snow, which was enough for us to make the 8-hour drive. The race was supposed to be 38 miles the first day and 24 the second, with 10-dog teams, but a deluge of lake effect snow the night before and the morning of the race left the groomer unable to keep up with the trail, so they shortened the course to 30 miles. The trail was quite beautiful. There were no rocks poking through the snow, which was soft and whispered against my sled runners as the dogs cruised along. Matt and I split the teams so that he had the faster dogs and I the trotters, but 20 miles into the course, I saw him up ahead and not much further, I passed him. Later, I found out he had to save another musher early on who was getting dragged under her sled after her team popped the snowhook. That act of heroism took some time and also some oomph out of his team.
Twenty-six miles into the 30-mile run, almost every team missed a right hand turn toward the finish. My team did as well, and within a quarter mile I suddenly had teams coming at me in droves. The general message was that everyone missed a turn, and no one knew where to go. I stopped my team and hooked down, watching the chaos, not really sure who to believe or what to do since no one seemed too sure of themselves. After watching at least 10 teams go by in the opposite direction, I finally decided I’d better follow suit and grabbed my leaders to do the 180-degree turn. It went fine. Soon we made the turn toward the finish.
There was a ton of passing all day. With the missing sign incident, many wanted the times for the day thrown out, but the judges or marshall opted not to. The next day we ran another 30 miles, and I again came in a few minutes ahead of Matt. In the end, my team placed 9th and Matt’s 12th. We had great training, beautiful trails, and some funny stories to tell. The sign debacle didn’t affect our placement much, if at all.
The next day we stayed and did another training run on the same trails for fun. Every day it snowed some more in the UP, and while we were forecast to get a foot of snow at home, that didn’t come to fruition. But we did get enough to soften things up a bit and we are grateful.
Now we have races four weekends in a row in February if they all happen, because if there’s one thing I’m learning about winter these days, it’s that if there’s snow, we’d better be running dogs.
