sarah stokey

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.

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.

 

 
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. 

 

 
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.

 

 
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.

 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…