Life on the trail

Mile 101

I woke up at 10:30 Sunday morning after a two-hour nap and checked the weather for the Steese Highway. It was terrible and supposed to get worse. Rod figured he’d get into the checkpoint between 1 and 2 p.m., so I hurriedly fed the dogs that were left in the yard, repacked the truck and left, stopping to fill the truck and a five-gallon can with gas.

I wanted to get to 101 Mile so that I could pick up any dropped dogs in case he decided to make an early run for the summit before the storm moved in. The road was slick, so I had to drive very slowly and I worried I was going to miss him or cause him to fall behind. Silly me. I can only remember one time he turned up at a checkpoint before I expected him to, and sure enough, when I arrived at 3:30 he was nowhere to be found.

I walked around for a couple of hours talking to other handlers and mushers, who said the trail from Angel Creek was horrible. Jennifer Cochran said her team fell over a bank and got tangled up in some driftwood and Rod helped pull her out. She had a big bruise under her left eye. Other mushers were banged up and bruised and all had stories to tell of running into trees, teams balking at overflow, mishaps and near-misses. I knew Rod wasn’t going to be happy.

He wasn’t. A friend came over to say Rod had told a passing musher he was going to scratch. Damn. Damn. Double damn. He arrived about 6 p.m. as darkness fell and it began to snow heavily. I thought the dogs looked good coming in. I hoped I could talk him into continuing race so I could get over the summit before the storm shut it down.

But, he’d had enough. The team wasn’t up to the conditions they had had to go through and the leaders were totally bummed out. He’d lost confidence in them, and they in him. He had also come to the conclusion that running a long-distance race just wasn’t compatible with our lifestyle, with both of us working full time on opposite shifts and a toddler to take care of. There just aren’t enough hours in the day (or money in the bank.)

It was time to go, and with the weather worsening, there was no time to lose. We found a race official, Rod signed the scratch papers, we packed up the dogs and the truck and headed out into the storm.