Willow Tug 300 Finish

I’ve never had to haul three dogs before.  Even two was a challenge.  Almost everything has to come out of the sled.  Luckily I planned for this and have a large food drop bag to load stuff into, then tie that on the back of the sit down sled where we normally carry straw if we are going to camp.  Loading Shelby and Sable, the two best performing leaders, has created a crisis in leadership and I sort through the remaining dogs Dallas listed.

Finally I move Ursus, an 8 yr old female, into lead with Lincoln, a hard charging 2 yr old male.  Lincoln has been firmly convinced that there is a female in heat in the team (there is in a team ahead of us) and has bothered all the girls he’s run with so far.  He tries that on Ursus and she immediately slaps his face.  The second time she does it, Lincoln figures she is serious and settles down to business.

We hit the trail with 9 dogs pulling a very heavy, hard to handle sled.  Performance is at an all time low.  Luckily this is flat river running, but the trail from Deshka Landing to the Tug Bar has lots of little hills, some quite steep and I don’t want to do that with three dogs in the bag.  There is a sign-in safety checkpoint at Deshka Landing, but there isn’t supposed to be a dog drop there.  I’ll ask anyway.  Otherwise I may very well scratch. 

It is getting dark as we come into Deshka Landing – I’m looking for Eagle Quest lodge, pull through the parking lot where I thought it was , but don’t see anyone there.  There is no sign (or I don’t see one) and it’s hard to stop on a plowed lot anyway so we keep going down onto the road, then pop up on the roadside trail..  We are quickly running down a power line and I see the turn off to the Willow swamp trail.  We’ve missed the checkpoint.  I debate maters, but discretion is the better part of valor and I turn the team around one more time. 

Back in the parking lot the checkers are standing wondering about the foolish musher who blew through.  They didn’t have any warning, you come around a corner and there you are.  It took them a couple seconds to come out.  Good thing I went back.  No I can’t drop a dog there – I was going to scratch then, but it just doesn’t feel right.  They help me turn around – I ask them to tell Pat Schue, who is waiting for me at the Tug Bar, that I’m still several hours out and traveling slow.

The Willow Swamp loop has a big kiosk with a map where the trail to the community center comes in.  The trail to the Tug Bar goes past this on the loop, turning off later.  Ursus is knows the trail to the community center, where we left the truck at the start, is a left turn here and that her foolish musher is just going to have to turn the team around again when he figures that out.  It took me 10 minutes of dragging the team back to the loop trail to go to the Tug Bar to convince her that even if I was wrong I was more stubborn than she (but it was real close).

A short way down the trail a little dog head pokes out of the sled bag.  Shelby is feeling better.  I should probably let all three girls out to relieve themselves (before they do it in my sled).  Shelby is using all four legs.  I walk her on a leash and she looks fine.  I flex the leg and find nothing.  My spirits pick up substantially – I haven’t injured Dallas’ dog after all.  It looks like she was dehydrated had a Charlie horse.  I put her in the team towards the back where I can watch her, reload the other two and we are off.

With 10 dogs pulling and 2 riding, we move faster and the lighter sled handles much better.  My spirits lift again, the dogs notice the improvement and they pickup.  Pretty soon I’m driving the freight train that I had last night and this is fun again.  We cruise through the night just having a ball.  Funny how you can go from the top of the world to the bottom and back to the top in under 24 hours, but that is life!

As we get to the Iditarod trail we catch and pass the two mushers that had past us while we were resting.  Now I’m feeling even better.  I have trouble pulling away from them and start running up all the little hills.  Slowly that makes the difference.  This is racing, even if it is in the middle of the pack, and by golly it is fun!

Two miles from the finish line I find a team camped in the trail – that’s odd.  The musher jumps up and asks if I have a spare headlight – hers broke and she has been camped there two hours.  She thought she was 10 miles from the finish and is frustrated with herself to find out it is closer to two.  Even in the dark she could have walked her team out in an hour.

We finish at 4:02 in the morning – Pat Schue has been waiting for me since 5 PM – the lady has the patience of a saint and I am very grateful for her help and support – it was wonderful.  Later that day I called Jen Seavey to report on the dogs and the race.  Jen asked me how I finished and I had to tell her ‘I don’t know.  Somewhere in the middle I suppose.”  Joe May told me once that the right way to run a race was to get your team to the finish line as fast as you were able.  When you get there you look around and if nobody else is there, you won.  I may not have won, but I was able to run this race that way and it feels pretty good.

Keep ‘em Northbound

Eric

PS – we were 12th.