Saturday night, we received about 10 inches of snow. Although we had big plans for the weekend — building a dog box, fixing Travis’ F-150, and doing some paperwork for some upcoming races — everything came to a grinding halt when we saw all that beautiful white fluffy powder outside on the ground.
We dragged our sleds out, both of which badly need repairs — Travis’ has some issues with the runners and one of my stanchions has a big old crack in it — hooked them together and hooked what we thought was a pretty big team of our older more experienced dogs, to go out and hit the trail.
Our team was:
Hope – Archie
Bud – Weiser
Bayou- Rally
Tamere- Jack
Pilot – Loon
Now, we had a pretty nice 10 dog string but we had two people, two sleds, and we were putting in a new trail through some heavy, wet snow. It was slow going to say the least. I think Travis and I did far more running than we did riding. Although we started off with several layers, by the end I was down to a t-shirt and a wind-breaker. We worked hard. The dogs looked absolutely phenomenal and we couldn’t have asked for more.
Travis was like a drill sergeant, a fact which I both liked and detested all at once. I’ve never felt more out of shape than on that run. Now, I consider myself fairly athletic — but I’ve got nothing on Travis. I mean, he didn’t even train for the Mt. Marathon race and he finished only 15 minutes behind the leaders. This is Wikipedia’s description of the race:
The Mount Marathon Race begins downtown, on Fourth and Jefferson, in front of the First National Bank, and ends a block south of where it began, on Fourth and Adams. The halfway point is a stone marker[1] atop Mount Marathon, 3022 feet (921 m) above sea level, and a mile and a half from the finish line. The total race course distance is about 3.1 miles (5 kilometers).
He did that race in one hour and one minute. Compare that with me, who although athletic has never been much of a runner. Now, I can run just not at his blindingly fast speeds. I’m more of a poke-a-long type of jogger rather than an all out sprinter. Still, I think I’m going to have to start running more if I want to keep up at all with him this winter. It was an amazing run and we had a tremendous time. The scenery was absolutely breath-taking. Unfortunately, we didn’t think to take a camera.
The one thing we weren’t anticipating was that despite all the snow, we actually ran in to a lot of unfrozen puddles and water. Our feet got soaked despite doing our best to maneuver around them or to stand on our sleds. At one point, the med was so thick it nearly sucked my boot off as I went to help push the sled along. Hopefully, after a cold night those parts of the trail will have set a little more…
After our adventure on the trail, we headed out to our good friend Rick’s house out in Moose Pass to help change a light-bulb. He informed us of an upcoming two-day race on the Aurora Dog Track that we think we’ll enter. It’s a 25/25 race that will run on the 10th and 11th of December. We’re in pretty good shape to run that race now so we think we’ll enter two teams provided the course has enough snow. We will not be doing the Sheep Mountain 150 but are considering running the Gin-Gin which is unique in the fact that it has both a men and a women’s division.
Fly’s puppies are two weeks old today and have recently opened their eyes. They are unbelievably cute. We’ll try to get some new pictures posted of them here shortly. Until then, happy trails!
