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Yet another diary of the events, progress, random thoughts, frustrations and joys as we train the team for a winter of racing.
(Read an account of the last four year's seasons by clicking here.) October 17, 2002 October 30, 2002 November 3, 2002 November 19, 2002 December 9, 2002 December 21, 2002 Iditarod updates 2003
Man, it is as predictable as the tides: I start running dogs for fall training and the rainy season hits here on the Kenai Peninsula. Tonight, my hands were covered with a thickening web of wet dog hair and sand. Sand clogs up the brass snaps. But at least it keeps the dogs cool.
We have started the fall training on schedule. I am trying to get the dogs out when the weather is coolest. This is just a time when I am getting the older dogs back in condition and getting the youngsters used to the routine. It's like fall training for the NFL.
We're running ridiculously short two- and three-milers, and won't bump up until I feel like everything's clicking. It is a time to try out young leaders.
It isn't as if they've had a lot of time off. They were running off and on through June, but took July off.
Even though I haven't signed up to run this year's Iditarod, I still am training up the dogs so they can handle that kind of long distance racing. If I don't run the race this year, some of my dogs probably will, just with other teams.
For an account of why I am not taking the seemingly obvious step of signing up to race Iditarod again, see Joe Runyan's story at cabelasiditarod.com
Well, I've been waiting two months for something new to crop up in our training, something worth noting here. Usually, it is a note about how the puddles and ponds are freezing over, or maybe our first snow or a run-in with a brown bear. Geez, something.
But the big news right now is how warm and wet it is. I mean, if it weren't for the evaporating daylight and total lack of leaves on the trees, you would think this was early September. In Seattle. October in Southcentral Alaska is usually a time of rapidly falling temperatures. Winter typically hits like a cold slap in the face.
I just started running the dogs on a loop Wednesday that seemed weird the first time through, and it took me a few moments to figure out why. Normally, the time of year when we reach this stretch of trail, the air is crisp, the ground frozen and covered with an inch or two of new snow. But it is nothing but infernal wet dirt and puddles.
Still, I keep telling myself, I remember a fall like this in the early 1990s and that turned out to be an exceptional snow year.
Despite my grousing, the dogs are doing well. The yearlings, who are experiencing their first training season ever, are getting into the groove. All the dogs are muscling up, and the two-year-old apprentice leaders are getting quality training up front.
Our local sled builder, Tustumena 200 race marshall, Kenai River fish cop, story-telling, dog-mushing (and other more colorful adjectives) Serum Run participant, Ed Borden, is battling cancer these days. He had back pain all summer and we all told him to shut up and stop whining. Turns out there was a pretty big lump on his spine.
He is getting great care from his girlfriend, Jane, and is his same old irascible self even though he's home in bed instead of training dogs. I mention this just in case anybody reading this knows Ed and maybe hasn't heard. If you are of the praying persuasion, give Ed a mention.
I pledge to be more diligent in my race diary entries from now on.
The Kenai Peninsula has been enduring wave after wave of wet storms. Our dog yard at one point was so full of puddles that we had to start moving dogs to higher ground. And that is really saying something. My dogs live on soft sand that drains quickly. The dogyard lake didn't last long, but it is still warm and wet with the same forecast for days.
The monsoons wiped out Oilwell Road, our only access to higher country in the Caribou Hills where we might get to some snow before long. But no matter, there's no snow up there yet either. The road is being quickly rebuilt.
I have learned to be patient and to work with the weather I'm stuck in, and wait and wait and wait. It will break. Snow will come, and the dogs will be ready to hit the trail.
Meanwhile, we are doing some mighty wet training with lots of puddles. I even have to keep a careful eye on the thermometer to make sure the dogs won't overheat on the run.
This is the time of year mushers start thinking about what races to run. I've had a couple of calls already from a couple of them asking about the Tustumena 200, here in Kasilof. That is on a pace to be just like it was last year, with a $25,000 purse, same checkpoints, rules -- everything. Last year was a lot of fun, so I hope for the same. It is a good race to run a young, inexperienced team, and I've done that for the last few years. And yes, it is hilly, irritatingly hilly.
I have only one injury to report right now, and it was a matter of Handel biting Kit's foot while the two were excited over seeing puppies running around the yard. The bite peeled skin off one of Kit's knuckles, punctured one of her toes, and worse, broke a third toe. The cool thing is, when I drove Kit up to the veterinarian, they had no record of her on file. She is seven years old and has never had a reason to see the doctor, and has only once been dropped from a race, and that was my poorly executed first attempt at the Copper Basin 300 in 1998.
Anyway, Kit's skin flap healed back beautifully and she's motoring around three weeks after the bite and we're going to slip the old girl back into training real soon. A veteran like that won't suffer for missing three weeks this time of year.
We've baked in unseasonably warm weather, and today we shaked. I was making an omelette for lunch when I suddenly felt queasy but didn't know why. I thought I was having some inner ear trouble as I struggled to keep my balance. Then I looked up to see my kitchen light/fan swaying back and forth. And I thought, this is the weirdest earthquake we've ever had. Most of the quakes I've felt around here feel more like a sharp jolt with shudders. This one just made everything sway back and forth in a sickening way.
"That was a large earthquake centered far away," I told Bree. She hopped on the iMac and got on the state's Tsunami Warning Center website and confirmed that it was a magnitude 7.9. It was located somewhere south of Healy and North of Cantwell.
I heard from mushers up north who said they felt the same queasy feeling I did, and some reported cracked driveways and stuff falling from the walls.
It took a lot of effort, but we managed to go on our first sled run of the season, approximately a month later than usual and with no real promise of a quality sled run in the near future. We are stuck in a truly ugly weather pattern.
Anyway, we loaded the dog truck and took a couple of sleds up Oilwell Road into the Caribou Hills. There was only about six inches of snow there, but the trail was good enough for a bumpy 14-mile run. We had been hoping for 20, but downed trees and just poor snow cover forced us all to turn around. Fortunately, we were out there running only 8 dogs per sled, so it wasn't too tough.
There were ice chunks and deep ruts that pulled our sleds down, so it took a little footwork. The dogs were extremely happy to be on new trail. I considered packing a camera, but it was too rough to risk bringing electronics on the sled.
Dean Osmar and his handler took turns with a snowmobile to scout for trail and a dog team. I had a dog team and Matteo, my handler, took out another one. It was Matteo's first dog run in Alaska and he handled the bumpy trail well. He was as happy to be on a sled as I was. Between the three teams, we had multiple passes, so that was a quality education for our youngest dogs.
None of the dogs was very tired when we were done, which means they are in shape and need to run a lot farther. But there is nothing we can do about that. The swamps aren't truly frozen yet, so there are no trails around home other than the short road system we travel with the four-wheeler.
I was trying to hold off writing another one of these entries until it snowed. Only then, I thought, would I have something to write about. Otherwise, my life has been a fairly uneventful, drab series of four-wheeler runs and twice daily checks of the National Weather Service web site only to find the same hopeless forecast. Lots of gnashing of teeth, etc. etc.
But here's something to report: Today I had the bright idea to run all 23 of my adult dogs together at once down on the beach along Cook Inlet. We've been running a set of 11 and a set of 12, and the runs have been getting longer and longer. It is tough, but we are finding 20- and 24-mile loops around here, despite the sopping wet swamps that haven't frozen over.
Anyway, I wanted to do a little weight training while also making the most of my limited time, so Matteo was going to ride with me on the four-wheeler as the dogs pulled us over the beach's soft sand. But before we took off, one of the dogs snapped its tug line. I grabbed another line to replace it and heard a snap. The gangline broke. I looked up in time to see a string of 16 dogs taking off down the beach without me, leaving me and seven others behind. The driverless team was moving at a nice lope and holding formation.
A dog team without a driver is a dangerous thing. It is one of a musher's worst nightmares because dogs can get hurt and there is nothing you can do to help them.
I hopped on the four wheeler, picked up Matteo and we started off after them, but realized we'd have to cruise faster if we were going to catch up to the rest. We pulled up to a post sticking out of the sand. Commercial fishermen leave wooden posts and iron bars anchored in the beach to hold their nets. Tying off the seven dogs, we jetted off at 35 mph and soon sighted the wayward 16 off in the distance, silhoutted against the skyline. But before long they slowed down and, amazingly, came to a stop.
When we pulled up alongside, I looked at the dogs and the only word to describe the looks on their faces was confusion. They were mildly tangled, but not enough that they couldn't have continued running. I figure that after a mile and a half of letting off steam, they just knew something wasn't right. So, without much trouble, we turned them around and jury-rigged the ragged end of the gangline to the four-wheeler so we could get back to the dog truck.
Lance Mackey rolled up on his four-wheeler and I told him he'd just missed the show. He asked how I was dealing with the lack of snow. I replied, "Well, I just tried hooking up 23 dogs for a run on the beach." He laughed and said he was just about to run his dogs, too, and he would see us later on the beach.
Looking over the gangline, we realized we easily had enough new line for a 16-dog string. So we hooked the oldest dogs back up for a long run, giving the seven yearlings a day off.
But this odd story isn't over yet. After we got back from an uneventful but satisfying run, Lance Mackey rolled up again and said, after he heard about my gangline breaking, he had gone home and checked over his gear, tossing out the older sections. But he is just as frustrated as I am, and decided to run a string of 18 dogs. Oddly enough, one of his tug lines broke right as his team passed my dog truck parked on the beach. When he stopped to fix it, HIS gangline snapped, with all but one of his dogs accelerating up the beach away from him.
Lance's luck was as good as mine today. His dogs happened to get snared on one of those metal gillnet anchors sticking up out of the sand. He caught up to his team easily and lashed everything back together, at least well enough to finish the run.
If it isn't sand clogging your brass snaps and getting in your dogs eyes, it's the incoming tide. Tim Osmar mis-timed a run and had to round one point as the waves were lapping against the bluff, according to his dad, Dean. His dogs ran up on the sharply angled bluff and, somehow, Tim did the same with his four-wheeler.
We're getting the miles in, but it ain't easy and it certainly ain't pretty.
Oh and one other thing, I signed up to run the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race again. More later on that. Right now, I'm more worried about this frustrating weather pattern blocking my ability to get these dogs in shape to run any race.
We got snow on the Kenai Peninsula -- our first real dump of the season, about a month and a half late. It happened while Matteo and I were going on what we expected to be a bumpy, clattering ride with small dog teams down a local road that is closed off for the winter to motorized traffic. But the snow got so heavy so fast that our eight-dog teams got a real workout and snow flakes stung our eyes. No, I am not complaining. I was a happy camper.
We have about six inches of fresh snow and more is coming. My big fear now is, will any of this series of storms we're expecting turn to rain? The forecast says no. You can only hope for the best.
So our next task is to check out our local trails and see how much damage has been done by fall's wind and heavy rain. There should be a lot of downed trees and washed out creeks.
Also, there's no real base to this snow yet, which means setting a hook is out of the question for a little while yet, so sledding still will require caution and care.
We got the snow one day after what I dearly hope is my last run on the Cook Inlet beach this year. We did successfully hook up 23 dogs to the four-wheeler and survived a 27 mile run without any damage to the dogs, the machine or ourselves, but there were some opportunities. The beach was punctuated by glare ice as creeks froze in the 5-degree temperatures. Imagine a long, long string of dogs, slipping and meandering on an angled plane of ice dotted with rocks and boulders. We only high-centered the four-wheeler once.
But, like I said, I hope those days are behind us for a while.
We wound up getting about six inches of powdery snow last weekend, just enough to run on if you are careful. I overshot the mark on our first run -- too much dog power. Matteo and I took out 12 dogs each. My drag tore off somewhere down a gully that was just glaciated creeks and stumps, and I banged my kneecap pretty good, but managed to hold on and pull myself back up onto the runners.
I rode back out there on snowmachine to retrieve the drag --
it is a heavy piece of the track from a snowmobile chained to
the sled runners. You stand on it to slow the team dow. It was
a bumpy, slow ride on a snowmachine, worse than on dog sled. It
sure gives me respect for race trail breakers on poor snow years.
I parked the machine at the base of the gully and walked up. Man,
I was amazed at how different it looks from on foot. It was nothing
but glaciation, tussocks, dirt lumps and stumps. Sure enough,
the track was lying right in front of a stump. I figure my
raised toboggan cleared the snag, but the drag caught it. It was
probably where I fell off, too.
Since then, we've shortened the loop to avoid that little gully
until we get more snow, and we're taking 8-dog teams. Much more
manageable. Othewise, my fingers are crossed that the Kenai Peninsula
-- and the rest of the state -- will get another good dose of
snow. We're still struggling to find suitable long trails around
here.
Good news and bad news for anyone interested in running the Tustumena 200. Good news is the snow depth down in the lowlands where I live is about a foot deep. It is powdery, but doable on a sled. I've seen worse. It is deeper, two to three feet, up high in the hills and trails there are normal and a pleasure to travel -- with one major hitch.
Washouts from the fall rains and downed trees are a real nuisance in places. The race will have to get to work clearing trail and building snow bridges or something where bridges washed away this fall. I trained on Clam Gulch trail and it is good. I also ran the dogs on 5000 road -- part of the T200 race trail -- a couple of days ago and the snow was good, but it was pretty amazing to see how flooding had chewed away parts of this logging road. Everything was easily passable by dog team there, but I hear Deep Creek scoured out a nasty gully at the base of Waterhole Trail, one that has trail gurus at the Caribou Hills Cabin Hoppers scratching their heads.
The team is coming together nicely, but we are about 150 to 200 miles short of our goal for this time of year. More importantly, we don't have enough of the 40 to 50- mile runs in the bag to run Copper Basin competitively. There is a tempering process that occurs over successive long runs, and a race as tough as the CB300 requires a hardened team. I know my guys could benefit if I entered the CB300 as a training run, but I have opted to pull out of that race so that I can train all 24 of my dogs around here, rather than travel to Glennallen's awesome trails for a training run for only 12 dogs. Instead, we will enter my A team in the T200 and Matteo will drive the yearlings in the Little T. It is a different scheme for me, but a good one given what the weather has handed us. I will really miss Copper Basin. I love that race.
March 6
I, Bree, will be writing updates for Jon while he is on the trail.
The race is off and it appears from the Iditarod website that Jon is doing very well. I haven't heard from him so I don't really have any exciting news. Hopefully he will call me when he is in Kaltag or Eagle Island with some trail information. Note that Jon hasn't had a chance to call me since he hasn't stayed in a checkpoint since Tanana.
What he is doing is running by the clock. He will run between 5.5 and 7.5 hours and then rest accordingly. Checkpoints are not falling at the same times as his rest stops so he forfeits his stay in a warm place for the cold ground. I'm not sure what his next move will be. I'm guessing he will stay somewhere on the trail between Galena and Nulato and then run into Kaltag. We will just have to watch his progress. Stay tuned for another update.
March 7
As I was about to head out of the house this morning the phone rang. It was Jon. He sounded rested and well.
The first couple of days he had been running during the heat of the day. Leaving Tanana he decided he must get on a run/rest schedule that has the dogs resting between noon and five. He left Tanana at 10:30pm and decided to run just 3 1/2 hours outside Tanana. He rested about four hours. Now he was in position to run the dogs from 6am until noon and rest from noon until 6pm. Finally he was on a good schedule. Jon followed that schedule all the way into Kaltag. He told me that he doesn't really want to run the dogs more than six or seven hours at a time but he made an exception coming into Kaltag. He ran straight for eight hours because he had decided he was going to take his 24-hour-layover there.
Jon dropped Kricket in Tanana, Salem in Galena, Wilco and Shasta in Nulato. Kricket, Salem, and Wilco were just tired. Shasta had a wrist injury reoccur that he had earlier in the year. The rest of the twelve dogs are going strong. Hopefully he can keep them in the team for the long haul down and back up the yukon.
He has been rotating Handel and Skeet in lead with SunBear. Kazan is in the team but now at seven has a harder time keeping the pace of the other dogs. She will be used as a go to leader if things get bad. Otherwise she will keep her place as a team dog. The twelve dogs still in the team are Kazan, Kit, SunBear, Tarzan, Tutka, Neptune, Handel, Rambler, Skeet, Teton, Mohawk, and Vitus.
It will be very interesting to see how Jon divides the next section of trail up. It is a long run from Kaltag to Eagle Island. I don't think he will want to do it in one push. Since the route as been re-routed this year he doesn't have as much dog food as Anvik as he would like. Anvik usually is a checkpoint that he never stays at but this year could become a stopping point for the team. Therefore he will have to a least stop in Eagle Island and pick up lots of dog food and supplies for the haul to Anvik.
Jon plans on calling me again tonight. I'm sure by then he has sat down and started figuring out what his next move will be.
Note that Jon is the writer in this relationship not me. I'm doing the best I can so forgive me if there is any errors or bad sentences.
March 8
Jon called last night at 11:30pm. A little under two hours before he was to leave Kaltag. He was in a hurry so we didn't talk long. He said he was leaving with all twelve dogs.
He said that he did not want to run his dogs over seven hours so he wouldn't be running straight from Kaltag to Eagle Island. Instead he would run two to three hours outside of Kaltag camp for two to three hours then run six hours into Eagle Island. After a rest in Eagle Island he would then run straight from Eagle Island to Grayling. I'm not sure where he will take his mandatory eight hour on the Yukon yet. But he will figure it out as he keys off the dogs.
Jon informed me that the trail has changed again. It will turn around at ANVIK and not Shagulek. Basically that will shorten the race by forty eight miles. I haven't heard any other talk about this change. It hasn't been on the news nor have I read it in Joe Runyan's articles.
March 9
Jon called from Grayling forty five minutes before his departure. I was outside in the poll barn so I missed his call. He left a message and said things overall are okay but he was upbeat and positive. He wasn't going to do anything crazy. He just wanted to keep doing what he was doing. He dropped Vitus because of a sore shoulder and foot. Mohawk was also dropped because of a minor back leg injury. The nine dogs that finished last year and Teton are all still in the team. He is very comfortable with his group of dogs.
There are a lot of mushers running very close together. It will be fun to see where Jon ends up in the pack.
March 10
Kasilof has been beautiful while Jon has been on the trail. Since I've been back from Fairbanks I don't think I have seen a cloud in the sky. The temperatures have been cool at night and hugging the freezing mark during the day. Even the northern lights have made their presence known a couple of nights here on the Kenai Peninsula. The only thing that is missing is snow.
Usually while Jon is running the race I come home and exercise the puppies on some sled runs. That hasn't happened this year because we are down to frozen dirt. The swamps behind our house are perfect for ice skating. Usually this time of year those swamps are covered in a couple feet of snow. So all the neighbors have been getting together and enjoying the ice. You could skate from swamp to swamp and probably go at least a mile. Even in odd crazy snowless years you can still make the best of what you got.
I don't think I will be hearing from Jon before I leave for Nome. I will drive up to Anchorage Tuesday and fly up to Nome Wednesday morning. This is my last update. Jon and I will be back in Kasilof March 17th.
Jon will probably camp out before he gets to Kaltag and then he will blow through Kaltag and rest again on the way to Unalakleet at the tripod cabin. My guess is once he gets to Unalakleet he will go checkpoint to checkpoint.
Sure finishing high up in the ranks is a wonderful achievement
but ultimately it doesn't matter where Jon places to me. If you
train and run your dogs to their abilities the place will take
care of itself. I'm sure Jon is doing that right now out on the
trail. He is a good musher and I thank everyone for following
him as he races. -Bree
bravenet.com