back in business

If I had never taken my sled to Laughing Husky, I would never have known what I was missing. My sled has been tracking poorly all winter, but with nothing but last year's ancient boat to compare it to I assumed it was my inexperience that kept me slamming into trees and bouncing off the trail and into powder. What a relief to realize it had nothing to do with me.

With the new drag mat and bridle in place and temperatures sitting at a balmy -20 just after dawn, we headed out on the nine-mile O'Brian loop. I was curious to see how all this down time had affected both their stamina and mine. The dogs tore out of the driveway, and when we got to long, straight downhill towards Ivory Jack's I spent time getting used to the dynamics of the new mat. It is set on hard plastic strips which hinge off the sled and this stiffness allows it to float over the trail when no pressure is applied. My old mat dug in if it was down, slowing the team significantly. Conversely, applying pressure to this new mat gives exponentially more braking power than pressure to the old mat (which was already adding lots of friction with no help from me) because of metal screws drilled into the rubber. With just a tiny bit of heel pressure, the screws bite into the trail and the team slows down fast.

At the bottom of the hill, I felt I had gotten the hang of the new mat. As we were crossing the slick ice on O'Connor Creek, I suddenly realized that we had run about a half-mile fast downhill and I hadn't once had to steer. And that is because we were solidly on the trail, not careening back and forth across it as I struggled to keep the runners on the pack. I paid close attention as we rounded the corner behind the community center and into some hair-pin turns and down-hill sections later on. The sled tracks perfectly, and I can pay a lot more attention to the dogs and the trail ahead now. I feel like I went to the car repair shop and drove away with an entirely new vehicle - better handling, responsive brakes.

The dogs ran well for the first five miles, then slowed down significantly. The girls especially looked tired. I found myself kicking and running much more than usual for the back-stretch of this particular loop. We took a shortcut home, a trail we hadn't run yet this year. It turned out that what was a well-traveled trail last year had only been traversed by one cross-country skier this season, and only half-way at that. Leo hesitated when I first asked him to turn off our usual loop, but didn't miss a beat when I asked him to turn off the faint ski-trail into untracked powder a few minutes later. He hauled us over a bank and through a trail-less section of forest. The team powered through the deeper stuff and never even looked back as I directed them through a maze of creeks and ponds until we popped out onto our regular route about a half mile from the house. The novelty of a new trail made up for the extra work of breaking it, I think.

At any rate, we made it home tired but all of us are glad to be back out on the trails.