One week countdown...
Feb/15/09
Next week at this time we will be bedding down dogs at Old Minto, our first night on the Serum Run Trail. Where has the time gone?
I want to again express my sincere appreciation to everyone for their support. I also want to apologize for the lack of updates. Beginning weeks before the first of the year, each day’s demands seemed to consume most of my waking hours leaving hardly a moment to spare and it will continue this way until we return home.
The following is a recollection of some of the goings on since the last blog entry.
We left Seattle on Saturday, February 7th, dropped Toolik and Ruby with Kathy and commenced 7 miserable days of traveling to Alaska. Actually our first day was pretty reasonable and we spent the night in Williams Lake, BC. Morning snow created a semi whiteout drive for the first half of the next day and it seemed at least half of each days drive was under adverse conditions climaxing in a broken trailer leaf spring 150 miles North of Fort Nelson, BC. Since there was no damage to the trailer or dogbox, it must have happened on the severe washboard and potholed road around Lake Muncho, just as we were making our overnight stop at Northern Rockies Lodge. We lost a days travel while I removed the broken spring, made the round trip to Fort Nelson for parts, spent 6 hours in laying in the snow installing two new springs, followed by about two hours in a hot shower reestablishing blood circulation.
We arrived at Scott Brown and Janet Sweeny’s house Friday evening and they were kind enough to bring home hot pizza so we could drop dogs, relax and visit without having to try and feed ourselves. Scott and Janet are musher friends who moved to Willow last year from the Seattle area. Included on their new property is a handler’s cabin which they had offered to let us use. Ann and Al Stead from Minnesota were also going to stay in the cabin as Al is going to compete in the Open North American Championship in Fairbanks, but the poor road conditions had extended their trip from a Friday to Monday arrival. This gave us time to work on drop bags and do the necessary sorting without getting in their way. With Janet’s help we finished our drop bags on Sunday, and Monday we rented a U haul van to pick up 45 bales of straw to take with our drop bags to the Airport on Tuesday. Wednesday we were finally able to get the dogs out for a run, we all needed it. We also got a call from Jamie West, our 2007 Willow host. She invited us to come over and stay at her place as Karen Ramstead had left for Whitehorse and the Yukon Quest 300. Sharing Scott and Janet’s cabin for three days, it was great to get to know Al, Ann I had known since 2000 having met her at mushing bootcamps. The cabin is small and Al had his dogs in the spare dog lot which also was the access to the trails from the cabin. This made it difficult for us to hook up and run as we had to run the gauntlet between Al’s dogs. Thursday we repacked and moved. Jamie has a spare dog lot and we were able to move the dogs out of the trailer onto drops and hook up and access the trail from the dog lot.
We are now less then a week from our departure to Nome and next on the agenda is to resort our gear and start the final packing. The trails around Willow are in great shape but the weather has warmed into the mid twenties to low thirties. The dogs are all doing well and seem to have recovered from the long drive to Alaska.
I have set up a share page for the spot satellite tracker and hopefully it will provide a track of our progress to Nome. The Spot tracking service only keeps current positions for a week so unfortunately there will not be a start to finish track. The share page can be viewed at:
http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=08P9zPYqB6shmqtzriGfuv01rlJqAADyS
Other Serum Runners have trackers too and their share pages can be accessed off the Serum Run Web Page @ www.serumrun.org.
I will try to get a final update off before we leave to Nenana on Saturday morning.
Thank you again for your support.
Happy Trails,
Don
I want to again express my sincere appreciation to everyone for their support. I also want to apologize for the lack of updates. Beginning weeks before the first of the year, each day’s demands seemed to consume most of my waking hours leaving hardly a moment to spare and it will continue this way until we return home.
The following is a recollection of some of the goings on since the last blog entry.
We left Seattle on Saturday, February 7th, dropped Toolik and Ruby with Kathy and commenced 7 miserable days of traveling to Alaska. Actually our first day was pretty reasonable and we spent the night in Williams Lake, BC. Morning snow created a semi whiteout drive for the first half of the next day and it seemed at least half of each days drive was under adverse conditions climaxing in a broken trailer leaf spring 150 miles North of Fort Nelson, BC. Since there was no damage to the trailer or dogbox, it must have happened on the severe washboard and potholed road around Lake Muncho, just as we were making our overnight stop at Northern Rockies Lodge. We lost a days travel while I removed the broken spring, made the round trip to Fort Nelson for parts, spent 6 hours in laying in the snow installing two new springs, followed by about two hours in a hot shower reestablishing blood circulation.
We arrived at Scott Brown and Janet Sweeny’s house Friday evening and they were kind enough to bring home hot pizza so we could drop dogs, relax and visit without having to try and feed ourselves. Scott and Janet are musher friends who moved to Willow last year from the Seattle area. Included on their new property is a handler’s cabin which they had offered to let us use. Ann and Al Stead from Minnesota were also going to stay in the cabin as Al is going to compete in the Open North American Championship in Fairbanks, but the poor road conditions had extended their trip from a Friday to Monday arrival. This gave us time to work on drop bags and do the necessary sorting without getting in their way. With Janet’s help we finished our drop bags on Sunday, and Monday we rented a U haul van to pick up 45 bales of straw to take with our drop bags to the Airport on Tuesday. Wednesday we were finally able to get the dogs out for a run, we all needed it. We also got a call from Jamie West, our 2007 Willow host. She invited us to come over and stay at her place as Karen Ramstead had left for Whitehorse and the Yukon Quest 300. Sharing Scott and Janet’s cabin for three days, it was great to get to know Al, Ann I had known since 2000 having met her at mushing bootcamps. The cabin is small and Al had his dogs in the spare dog lot which also was the access to the trails from the cabin. This made it difficult for us to hook up and run as we had to run the gauntlet between Al’s dogs. Thursday we repacked and moved. Jamie has a spare dog lot and we were able to move the dogs out of the trailer onto drops and hook up and access the trail from the dog lot.
We are now less then a week from our departure to Nome and next on the agenda is to resort our gear and start the final packing. The trails around Willow are in great shape but the weather has warmed into the mid twenties to low thirties. The dogs are all doing well and seem to have recovered from the long drive to Alaska.
I have set up a share page for the spot satellite tracker and hopefully it will provide a track of our progress to Nome. The Spot tracking service only keeps current positions for a week so unfortunately there will not be a start to finish track. The share page can be viewed at:
http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=08P9zPYqB6shmqtzriGfuv01rlJqAADyS
Other Serum Runners have trackers too and their share pages can be accessed off the Serum Run Web Page @ www.serumrun.org.
I will try to get a final update off before we leave to Nenana on Saturday morning.
Thank you again for your support.
Happy Trails,
Don