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.
