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The Warming

Sarah · January 3, 2016 ·

Today the forecast calls for rain. Yesterday, it was 45 degrees in Willow. When I got back from my training trip to the Denali Highwah, I tried to sleep but the cabin was too warm. Even up in Cantwell, I found myself too hot, gloveless, and at times mushing in the rain. It was almost welcome because it was so hot. But it is impossible to love something that barges into a party unwelcomed. The warm weather has its place; that isn’t now.

When I went to sleep my dog Max climbed our cabin ladder. He must have missed me. He quickly grew too hot upstairs but I had no idea how get him down. Finally, with coaxing he made it.

It is a sad reality being a dog musher when it feels, more and more, as if winter is slowly withering away. The peaceful gleaming white of winter is being replaced by the ugly Browns and beiges of spring break-up. Only it isn’t spring. And this is t the first winter we have seen grow sick with warmth.

Here we are at the start of 2016 and the snow outside is melting rapidly. The snowberms alongside the road are shrinking and turning dark brown as mud and dirt from trucks falls off and gets sprayed onto the sides of the roads. Driving by our trails, they were the sickening off white of slush. It has sort of a tan colored look when it is particularly wet.

Where has the cold disappeared too?

There are those who rejoice at the warm temperatures. They are not Alaskans. They do not thrive in winter. So much of Alaskan culture is tied to the cold. Dog sledding, snowmachining, skiing, skating, sledding – all significantly harder or impossible to do when the snow turns to rain.

Sometimes, I wonder if we are part of a dying breed and a slowly shifting sport. It is impossible to deny the climate is changing. It’s not up for debate and hasn’t been for nearly two decades. The endless war on science bewilders me, saddens me.

A hundred years ago dog sledding was the heart of th8/ state, connecting communities with mail and supplies during the winter. Now, these same places year after year haven’t had enough snow.

During the summer, we watch as the sun slowly eats away at the toe of Godwin glacier where we run our summer glacier Dogsledding tours. Each year Godwin Glaicer recedes about 30 to 50 feet. This was a river of ice that took thousands of years to weave out of the mountains. Now, we watch it shrink rapidly right before our eyes summer after summer.

Today is warm. I put on a t-shirt. I visit the dogs wearing a skirt and rain boots. I cringe at the thought that warmer days are to come and to keep coming. The dogs nails are sharp against my bare skin and I am reminded that they need trimming. The chores never end. So be it.

How can we breath life into winter?

Mushing Home – Part 3 of the Denali Highway Trip

Sarah · January 2, 2016 ·

This is the 3rd and final installment on a series of posts describing my 165 mile training trip o the Denali highway with fellow Iditarod musher, Wade Marrs. You can read part 1 and part 2 first but do not need to in order to enjoy this post.

It was hard to leave the warm hospitality of Alpine a Creek Lodge. They fed us some delicious biscuits and gravy and a few hours later some pasta and an Amazon salmon spread with crackers. I sat next to the wood stove and wrote about our adventure out and chit-chatted with the kind hearted snow machiners that had fed us breakfast the day before.

I’ll be the first to admit that I wasn’t exactly motivated to be on a fast schedule out of there. My dogs were a little tired and I had two that were sore. We planned on running the 65 miles straight back to the truck. My dogs longest run up to that point had been 50 miles. Mostly we’d been running 30s and 40s and doing lots of camping. I didn’t want to ask more of them at the end of the trip, knowing that we would be heading out into some gnarly winds, then necessary.

So I wrote my blog, ate lunch, watered dogs, and slowly got ready. I had a few repairs to do on my sled. One of snow hook lines had snapped on the previous run. Snow hooks serve as our anchors when we stop the team. I’d put on a spare rope I’d had in my sled that was close to the right length but was a few feet too long. I knew this at the time but I had one hook that worked great so if my back-up hook wasn’t perfect then quiet frankly whatever. If it became an issue, I knew I could always tip my sled over.

So Before we left I fixed my line and made careful to make it the right length. Too short or too long makes it difficult to stand on your sled while you pull it out of the snow. Not impossible to get around, but an annoyance I didn’t want to have to deal with.

I slowly put booties on my dogs, having to unravel each dog out of their tight Coul before doing so. I stood them up for a few second, put their booties on, and then they curled back up to hide from the wind. Normally when I booty a dog I have the booty I am going to put on in my hand and the others on the ground. That didn’t exactly work with all the wind so I held what I wasn’t using in one hand while bootying. After having tried this, it was so much more efficient than what I had been doing and I’m surprised at how long it took me to adopt something so simple.

Before we took off, I filled my cooler with water and kibble to make a wet meal for the dogs. Hydration is so important and windy conditions often cause more water loss so having a quick wetsnack really helps with their overall hydration.

The mush back was mostly uneventful. At one point you go around a wide sweeping hill. When you look at the edge of the road you can see the tops of trees down far below its edge. I don’t think I realized how much I hated heights until, in my sleep deprived state, I felt as though we were getting closer and closer and oh my god closer to the edge. Of course, we were fine. I’ve learned through racing and other mushing trips that the more tired you become the more things become mind-over-matter. So instead of worry about something that had a 99.9% chance of getting swept off the road, I focused on the beautiful dog butts in front of me.

Wade waited for me at the bottom and we crossed a long bridge that spanned the Susitna river together. His team, older, more experienced and more miled up than my own, took off at an impressive clip in a fast steady trot. My team, with 7 dogs who this was their first season running, couldn’t keep up but I knew that asking them to was unrealistic. He had a seasoned veteran team. I had babies. Asking my dogs to keep up after going 100 miles with them would be like asking a T-ball team to go out and play a game against the Red Sox. So we travelled slower, but not much.

It was warm out for most of the run. At times I took my gloves off because I was too hot. At other times, my parka was wrapped tight around my face in an effort to prevent the wind from getting at me. When the wind came, my team would blow from one side of the road to the other. I couldn’t help but think it was like the wind we playing ping pong with us.

These heavy wind conditions only lasted a few miles but I was so happy with how Penny did leading. She drove into the wind and kept the team on track. Last year, she spent the winter skijoring with our friend Meret so this is her first full season mushing. She is going to be just like her mother, Fidget – an absolute super-star. At times the trail was soft and blown in and others it was hard and fast. The dogs and I enjoyed it all.

Halfway through the run, I started feeling how tired I was. The day we left for the highway, I’d only gotten about 5 hours of sleep the night before. That night (Wednesday), when we were supposed to be mushing, we ended up digging out the truck and getting unstuck. (If you haven’t, you can read about that in part 1.) Because of how long that took, we only got 3 hours of sleep. We took off and spent most of Thursday on the trail, arriving at Alpine Creek Lodge around 6:30am. Once settled in we slept for about 3 hours and then ate breakfast at the lodge, I wrote my second blog post, and we hung out with snow machiners. By the time we got back to the truck around 11:45pm, I had slept a grand total of 11 hours since that Tuesday or to put in better perspective during a 96 hour period I had only slept 11 hours.

Going down the trail, my fatigue began to hit me. The night before I had suffered from minor hallucinations — as my mind morphed pine trees into cabins, oil tanks, animals, and farm silos. I’d snapped back awake eventually but it was hard and took some serious effort. Mind over matter is infinitely harder when your mind is worn-out. But I preserved.

On this run, I decide that the best way to stay awake was to sing. Sure, watching my dogs was important, but my mind needed something more active to keep itself going. I belted out Adele for all the moose and caribou to hear. Apparently, they didn’t think much of my singing because they stayed off the trail. Good.

I did see a rabbit and a common murre. These are ocean dwelling birds that have blown inland due to strange weather patterns. They can’t survive away from he water so if you see one you are supposed to catch it. I stopped my team and went to pick it up but it was warm out and I didn’t have gloves on. I took one look at its long beak and, quite frankly, it’s grumpy attitude and rifled through my sled to pt some on. When I got my gloves on it had already taken off and was no longer on the trail.

One of the rules of dog mushing is to be very careful about walking away from your sled. If your team pulls your hook, they could take off and leave you in the dust. But my dogs had run a long way so I set both my hooks and decided that the life of this little bird was worth it. As soon as I stepped off the trail, I sunk up to my belly button. The bird darted further into the woods. So that was the end of that.

I felt bad leaving it behind, knowing it would most likely die, but wih a full string of 16 dogs in front of me who were now ready to run wallowing in waist deep snow to chase a pissed off bird seemed like a moronic idea.

So down the trail we continued. It seemed like no matter how far we travelled though, the truck wasn’t getting any closer. Time, it seemed, was moving excruciatingly slow. But the miles came and went. We passed a few teams who were just starting their runs.

At one point we passed the mythical parking lot where more trucks were, miraculously, more trucks and an enclosed trailer were parked. You’ve got to be freaking kidding me. I thought to myself. How the heck did they make it through those wind berms? Seeing the four trucks and trailer there made me laugh. Apparently it was just Wade and I who had all the back luck.

The one thing that can be tough about the highway is the mile markers. I couldn’t remember what mile we were parked at. I watched them slowly tick by: 116, 117, 118… On and on and on.

Finally, at mile 130 we made it to the truck. We loaded dogs and sleds and gear, prayed the truck would work, and miraculously left.

But we didn’t make it far. I had warned Wade that I was absolutely exhausted. I would do my best to talk to him and help him stay awake while he drove but not to judge me by what came out of my mouth.

We’d been in the car for about a half hour chatting and driving when I stopped making sense. We were talking about how fun the trip was when I launched into a tangent about how it was just as good as the movie.

“What movie?” Wade asked, slightly confused.

“Jurassic Park.”

“Oh.” There was a long silence. “Weren’t we talking about dog mushing?”

“I really liked Jurassic world.”

At this point, we realized that we both needed to sleep, found a pull off, and passed out in the truck for almost 7 hours. You have to be tired to sleep in a truck for that long because that is not a position humans are designed to sleep in. Wade got driving at some point and I continued to nonsensically mutter responses. At one point Wade was on the phone but I still had my eyes closed and responded to everything he said.

Then, out of nowhere, I popped up and said, as if it were perfectly normal, “ok my brain just reset. I’m good to go.”

And for the rest of the ride, I was. Now that my dogs are put away and this final installment has been written, I am going to go pass out.

Hitting the Trail – Part 2 of the Denali Highway Camping Trip

Sarah · January 1, 2016 ·

This is part 2 of my Denali Highway Adventure with Wade Marrs. Read part 1 here.

Well, after a harrowing adventure with the truck and dog trailer, we finally made it back to the parking lot we were supposed to start at and began hooking up. We were greeted by a kind group of snow machiners who upon hearing our story offered us coffee and gave us breakfast burritos.

On three hours of sleep we were a little slow to hook up. We had no drop chains so had to put the dogs directly in the team. To hold the leaders out before the dogs were hooked up I ended up having to use a Wade’s spare tire because my leader hook wouldn’t hold. We were going to run down the road which was still quite icy and we knew we’d have very little breaking available to us.

Eventually, we got everyone sorted, pulled hook and hit the trail. It was glorious. Given the weather report we had heard I made one last minute substitution: I took Boston, a proven leader in the difficult wind conditions we might face, and left Shark, who was one of the younger dogs with more experience.

Our first run was great. My team took a long time to settle in and we’d made the decision to camp early, about 30 miles in partially due to the wind drift conditions some snow machiners had warned us about and the need to get more water into our teams because of our later start.

The run itself was uneventful. Conditions were, on this stretch, better than expected and I was happy to see my team doing so well in the hills. This was our first real training run with consistent, solid climbs. The dogs performance would have, however, never indicated this.

The country surrounding the Denali Highway is breathtaking. As we went down the trail the storms from the previous day started to break. The sky was this beautiful soft buttery yellow that echoed off the mountsides. It snowed intermittently and at times the wind howled in our faces.

But the dogs kept running and so we simply pulled our parkas tighter around us.

When we hit about 30 miles we stopped at a popular camping location for teams on the highway. We made camp got water and food into the dogs. Overhead the northern lights began to emerge and slowly scrawled across the night sky.

As we took off, I put a juice in my pocket. I try hard to work on hydration out on the trail. It’s something I’m not good at so its something I’ve made a point to work on. Before we had left, the juice had spilt all over me and getting my base layers soaked. Plus, I smelled like strawberry banana. Gross. I debated changing but it was warm and my layers should keep me warm when wet. I had extra stuff if I needed it but decided this was a good oportunity to test whether or not they’d keep me warm when wet. I mostly stayed warm. But the thing that was really killing me was that I was itchy. The juice was sticky and not reacting with my skin. Try scratching an itch through 4 layers and see how far it gets you!

By the time our 4 hour camp was up, the dogs were more than ready and the northern lights were in their full glory. For the first part of our second run, it was honestly hard to focus on watching the dogs. Giant green and yellow swirls slowly wandered across the sky and from star to star. For a long time the constellation Orion was fully dressed in greens. He looked stunning.

At times, the swirls were punctuated by the more angular displays of lights. Straight lines that came and went and moved like a piano players fingers, up and down across the sky.

The dogs seemed to thrive on this run. They settled in immediately to a smooth trot, each falling in line behind the other in perfect unison. Unlike our previous run where the dogs were disjointed and moving individually, on this run they seemed to gel and moved as a single unit.

We went another 30 miles, stopping to camp about 5 miles before Alpine Creek Lodge. When we had called to tell them we were mushing in, they informed us that they were having a firework display for the new year. We didn’t want to put our dogs through that nor did we want to interrupt the show as we would have almost certainly arrived right at midnight. Instead, we camped and decided we would go past The lodge then turn around and mush back to it for a 35 mile run. Besides, we had the northern lights as our firework display!

We took off and by the time we were passing the lodge, Wade and I were both struggling with staying awake. I kept nodding on and off and found myself getting lost in obscure thoughts. The road was on a high ridge that dropped off suddenly on either side and in my sleep deprived state My anxiety over slipping off the edge was somewhat consuming. although technically possible, I had to to constantly remind myself how improbable it was. Then snap oh I’m supposed to be mushing! And I’d focus again on my dogs.

This was the first real wind blownt trail we encountered. The drifts were deep and, at one point, my tiny swing dog Pippa completely disappeared under the snow. But we kept on moving, the dogs swimming through snow climbing up hill after hill.

For a long time, I wondered if we would ever reach the turn around. It seemed like we were just continuing to climb up and up through drift after drift. Progress was slow but it was progress.

Eventually, we made the turn around and mushing back to the lodge, now it seemed mostly down hill, was far faster.

We got in around 6am, fed our dogs, put jackets on them, and by 7:15 had gathered our things and brought them into a small wall tent. I was so grateful I’d bought a new sleeping pad. I threw it in the floor, took off my sleeping bag and climbed in and slept for 3 hours.

I woke up cold and hungry and walked up the the lodge. Claude and Jennifer had graciously prepared us an outstanding breakfast and we chit chatted with Kristin and Andy Pace from Hey Moose! Kennels.

Now we are gearing up for the 65 mile run back. The looming question we have is, will the truck work? I am thinking it will but again, what can go wrong will go wrong so I’m not holding my breath.

Either way, I’m sure Wade and I will figure it out. We can’t fix it from here though so we will have to wait and see.

Happy Trails, Sarah

This was the second post in a 3 part series. Click here for the final installment.

Stuck in a Rut – Denali Highway Camping Trip Part 1

Sarah · January 1, 2016 ·

This is the first blog post in a 3 part series.

Well, our camping trip stared off in the most exciting of ways. After an uneventful drive to Cantwell we headed towards the Denali Highway. It was about 10:30 and we figured we’d be hooked up and on the trail by 11:30 or 11:45 at the latest.

But, like always, what can go wrong will go wrong.

Neither Wade or myself are particularly familiar with the Denali Highway. Wade’s previous trip up with Travis ended being somewhat exciting after the DOT plowed the last 10 miles from where they had parked making it an eventful mush to the truck.

Well, we headed down the road and this time Wade knew where the parking lot was. Or, at least, that’s what we thought.

The road looked plowed and Wade knew were they had plowed to the last time, so we figured we were golden.

Wrong.

So we continued down the road in the truck as it didn’t look ideal to mush on and the parking lot where they had plowed to the last time was still up ahead.

It was smooth going on the icy road until, of course, it wasn’t. We had known the forecast for the area had called for high winds. It was part of the draw. Nothing better than training in adverse conditions. We also knew that we should anticipate fresh snow.

What we didn’t know is that DOT reversed it’s decision and was now no longer plowing the 10 further miles. There was a sign somewhere but neither of us being familiar had thought that was wrong. But of course it wasn’t.

Things were smooth sailing for the first 6 or 7 miles. Then, the nemesis of our fun arrived. It was a small, wind-drifted snow birm. From the truck, it looked like a small no-frills give your truck just a tad more gas sort of bump. It didn’t look intimidating and surely this small mound of snow couldn’t get us stuck.

But it did.

The wind had drifted the snow in such a way that the snow was rock-solid. We plowed through it and realized quickly that this was an oh shit moment and we had to be careful not to get stuck. So we rocked the truck gently back and forth at first and had good enough traction that we could free ourselves but Wade’s trailer, loaded with 6 heavy dog boxes, 33 dogs, and two sleds wasn’t having it. We got a little bit backwards but the trailer started to jack-knife. We pulled a little more forward and risked getting more stuck.

Back and forth and back and forth. Minute movements of touching the wheel and giving gas. Eventually, however, we had to concede that we were stuck.

Wade Marrs uses a ratchet strap to try and left the trailer up high enough to grt it hitched back on to the truck — unfortunately getting the truck unstuck was easy, getting the broken trailer back onto the truck proved to be more challenging

We put on gear and went outside to assess just how badly we had screwed ourselves. Overhead the northern lights danced in whimsical patterns. Despite being stuck, we stopped and watched them for a bit. Reds and pinks darted once or twice in small segments across the sky. At least if we were stuck, we told ourselves, this wasn’t a bad place to be.

We decided the best thing to do was to unhook the trailer which was no longer lined up straight with the truck so that we could focus on one problem at a time. We got the trailer off and then had to power through the drift. We used a combination of digging, packing snow down, and laying down straw we had for traction. The poor truck had to work hard, and so did we, but eventually we got it unstuck.

We high-fived our minor success.

The trailer was somewhat perpendicular to the road. Hooking the truck up as-is with no real ability to pull forward would almost certainly land us in the position we’d just spent the better part of an hour getting ourselves out of.

The trailer conveniently had some spots that it was conceivably for us to tie the truck into besides using the ball hitch. It was not an ideal option but given our situation seemed like the best option. We only needed to go far enough to straighten the trailer out and from the angle we were pulling from that shouldn’t have taken much.

We carefully concocted a way to rig things up that would help us achieve our desired goal. We got the trailer straightened out but, somehow in the process, had managed to seperate the trailer from its welded jack. So now we had a 20 foot trailer with 6 heavy dog boxes, 33 dogs, and two sleds with the receiving hitch on the ground and no jack to be able to lift it up.

We had to lighten the load which meant dropping dogs and removing 2 of the dog boxes from the trailer

What followed was several hours of good natured oh this sucks and we’ll what if we tried this and so on and so on. We tried all sorts of things but in the end had to unload 20 dogs and take off two of the heavier dog boxes. We made a picket for our dogs out of gangline and unloaded them, two by two, to sit in the snow and stare at us as we tried to get ourselves out of our self-created mess.

2am trying to figure out how to reattach the trailer after the jack broke off.

Then, we took an industrial strength ratchet strap and had it going up over the tailgate and attaching back in to the framing of the truck to give us leverage. Slowly, we ratcheted the trailer up into the air. We got the trailer at the right height and tried to shove the trailer onto the ball hitch, but given how the whole thing was rigged we weren’t strong enough.

I had suggested earlier that we should cut a tree and use it as a lever. Wade got his ax out and picked a good sized spruce. With his new lever, he began pushing the truck in place. When I said it was lined up from my position standing in the back of the tailgate, my job was to undo the ratchet. I undid the ratchet but we were a fraction of center so it wouldn’t couple. Wade continued to use the tree lever to keep things in place and I hopped in the truck and moved the smallest bit forward.

The trailer hitched in. Sweet, sweet, sweet, success.

Then came the realization that, well, this was not really a parking spot, the road was too narrow, and Wade was going to have to go in reverse the 6 or 8 miles we’d come in.

Leaving the truck where it was, wasn’t an option. It was starting to snow and, if we didn’t get it out now, we might not be able to get it out at all of we just went on a dog run.

Fine. We laughed about how this was probably the worst start to a mushing adventure pretty much ever. We joked. We both took it in stride. We knew getting pissed or frustrated would only make the situation worse so we chose not to.

So then we started backing up. It was slow going, the trailer was not reversing well straight, we were tired, and we just wanted to be done. We’d gotten to the highway around 10:30pm and it was now nearing 4am.

Backing up was slow and frequently Wade had to put the truck in drive. Then, at one point, the truck decided to quit working all together. We shut it off, unsure of how to proceed, shot the shit and then decided to see if we could get it to go again. It wouldn’t. We repeated the cycle and eventually through what must have been some sort of divine intervention, the truck decided it was going to work again. This, of course, was completely beyond our control but we celebrated nonetheless.

Then it happened again. We repeated the cycle and found success once again. Then it happen again. It was nearing 5am at this point and we’d been up all night. I grabbed my parka from the back seat, curled up into a tiny ball in the passenger chair, and fell asleep.

We woke up around 8 and continued driving backwards. It was slow going and we didn’t cover much ground. I wa grateful I wasn’t someone who struggled with car sicknesses. Between going backwards and all our zig zagging, it would have been easy to get sick.

Wade Marrs patiently reversing the truck and trailer

We spent another two hours slowly backing up. We have officially been at the highway and the closet we have gotten to mushing is dropping our dogs.

Well, happy trails and look forward to part 2 when we actually get out on the trail to mush!

Continue to Part 2…

A Special Focus On The Iditarod Vet Book

Sarah · December 30, 2015 ·

One of the things most new fans to dog sledding want to know is how are dogs are taken care of out on the trail by vets and how the logistics of so many dogs is managed. During Iditarod and other dog sled races, mushers must carry a vet book. In Iditarod, it is a mandatory piece of gear and mushers are required to have a vet sign it at every checkpoint to ensure the dogs have been examined.

Each dog on Iditarod is given its own unique identification tag. The identifcation tag is composed of two values, a number and a letter.The number refers to the musher. Each musher’s value is determined by their starting position. In 2015, Travis started 56th so each of his dogs had a “56” on their tag. Each dog is then individually assigned a letter. Each musher is given their own tags so we put our tags 56A, 56B, 56C, on each dog on Travis’ team.

photo courtesy of Dianne Johnson of thhe Iditarod Trail Committee

At the front of the vet book, each musher lists their dogs name and next to their dog writes down the letter of the tag that dog was given. Additionally, Iditarod takes down the name, tag of each dog, and their microchip number. This way dogs have two identifiers out on the trail: their microchip which can be scanned or their dog tag on their collar.

The vet book is an integral way for vets at different checkpoints to communicate what they see in a dog or in a particular dog team. It allows volunteers to quickly look up the name of a dropped dog and relay it to those back in Anchorage.

2015 Iditaods Travis Beals Vet Book. The starting 16 dogs.

travis beals 2015 iditarod vet book. the first page has each dog, their “letter”, and their age.

The vet book itself is rather small and is waterproof. Many mushers elect to tie it to their sled. If you do not have your vet book, you cannot continue down the trail. If you forget your vetbook at one checkpoint, you have to go back and get it — wasting valuable time.

We generally tie our vet books to our sleds so that we cannot lose them. It allows us to access them quickly and prevents the volunteer vets from accidently walking away with them.

Mushers are required to have a vet sign their vet book at each checkpoint. Mushers also have to sign the vet book. The vets may make notes or may simply put an “all good” or a smiley face. Common notes might be about dogs who were prescribed antibiotics.

The vet book is a valuable tool to help mushers and vets make sure that the dogs get the best possible care while out on the race.

This year in training, I am carrying my own “vet book” so that I can practice not losing it. For those who know me, they know my struggle. My book, however, is a bit different. I am using it to make notes about dogs on or directly after a run so that I can keep the best records possible on my team while training myself to hold onto the small yellow notebook. My notes are usually about when I fed or watered and the effects I’m seeing in my dogs. It’s something Aaron Burmeister mentioned casually at the rookie meeting so I figured I would give it a shot. If I’m going to practice carrying a notebook, I might as well make some notes!