chilled

The cold snap that settled in after our Goldstream run didn't lift for a week. The temperature sank down to around forty below zero and flirted with fifty below at night. I had taken the weekend off, with plans to drive down to Glennallen to follow the Copper Basin 300. This fall, when I was picking up Pepper from Aliy Zirkle, I asked her which of the mid-distance races she felt was the best to test of a musher looking to run a thousand miler. She didn't even hesitate to point to this race, which she said offers some of the most challenging, technical trail of any mid-distance race and the psychological challenge of having your dog truck at every stop, offering mushers an tempting way out of the cold and snow and miles. If you can finish that race after walking past your dog truck and every checkpoint to keep on racing, she said, you're a long way towards proving you've got what it takes for the big time. I'd been looking forward to hanging out at the checkpoints (all on the road system, a rarity) and seeing what this race was all about.

But I was thwarted by our car, and the weather. For one thing, I didn't want to leave Peter stranded at the house with no way to get to town for three days. Besides, he had just come back from ten (extra) days down in the states and I wasn't too keen on ditching him so quickly, anyway. Also, getting excited about sleeping in the truck when temperatures are dipping towards thirty below is a tall order. So instead of packing up every sleeping bag we own and driving five hours to the Copper River Valley, I hung out at home with Pete, kept the woodstove stoked and started cycling dogs into the house to defrost and warm up.

Pico is very skeptical of Parka & Devilfish's occupation of the couch ... and Pete's lap.

Pepper's manners aren't perfect, but her love is pure. The kisses are pretty wet, though.

I was also looking forward to having a chat with Jodi Bailey. She had offered, before our trip, to talk with me about Norrin's phobia of bridges and general PTSD issues. Now that we were back and running again, it was clear that Reese was the dog I needed some help thinking through. We were going to talk on Thursday, but DewClaw kennel was slammed getting Dan off to the race so we postponed until Sunday when things might have settled down a bit.

Saturday, as folks started posting pictures of the Copper Basin start, I began regretting my decision to stay home. Saturday night, I was seriously considering heading down anyway, even if I would just catch the tail end of the race. But Sunday morning, the news was all over facebook and the mushing blogs: the Copper Basin 300 had been canceled. The trail after the second checkpoint (nearly a hundred miles in) was impassable despite the best efforts of trailbreakers on snowmachines, and in the end even the race billed as the toughest 300 miles in Alaska had to acquiesce to her.

I called Jodi that afternoon and had a great, rollicking chat about everything from the social-media blow-up about the race cancellation to the frustration of workplace politics. She had a lot of insight into Reese's recent behavior, and had suggestions that ran the gammut from demoting him from lead for a while (it was a relief that my instinct on that had been right) to revising the way I call turns and enforce commands to changing the way my tuglines are set up. I came away from that conversation with some great tools to try with Reese - when I let him back up front - and the growing certainty that his obsession with turning the team around is entirely my fault.

The day of our conversation, I happened to pick up a mushing book on training that I hadn't read before, Lead, Follow or Get Out Of The Way by Iditarod champion Mitch Seavey. The book itself is awful to wade through - the attitude he takes with his reader is at turns dismissively presumptuous  and aggressively defensive - but the trove of training insights are worth the slog, even though I don't swallow them whole. In the end, my take-away from this book (as if it hadn't sunk in enough already) was that my handling of Reese early in the season laid solid ground work for the trouble we are having now. If I'm going to run him up front at this point, I need to be prepared to do some water tight remediation.

After another stint at work, I came home to a break in the temperature. Twenty below at the house felt tropical. I hooked up the dogs in the yard, and planned on using Billie and Xtra as my interim leaders. But our launch out of the yard left me floundering. Fifty yards down the trail, I saw that Xtra was running as far behind Billie as the neckline would allow. Her tug was dragging in the snow under Pepper's feet. I slowed the sled to make sure she wasn't tangled and but after another few yards, she stopped completely, letting Pepper and Devilfish plow right over her. Billie didn't seem to interested in running up front alone, either. I stopped and walked up to untangle everyone. I put Pepper up front with Billie, since she has come through once we're down the trail a few times in the past. But she was much more interested in following me back to the sled and diving into the snow on the side of the trail next to Devilfish than running up front - or even standing up front - with Billie.

I stood there, barely out of the starting gate, holding on to Pepper with one hand and fending off Devilfish's desperate attempts to jump into my arms with the other, and looked down my line of dogs. Xtra and Pepper had made their intentions clear. I thought Billie would run if I put him with someone else who wanted to stay up front, but who? Parka and Devilfish are both untested in lead, at least by me. And Reese, now howling like a maniac and slamming his harness in wheel, is on probation. No more exceptions. I looked at Norrin, alone in his team spot, huge bushy tail flagging. I had promised myself I wouldn't run him up front until he'd had a chance to build some more confidence. But then again, the run I was planning was mellow and flat and straight, just the sort of run I'd determined he and Billie would do best at. I switched him with Pepper and walked back to the sled.

Norrin and Billie charged down the out-trail to the road without a step of hesitation. I called the haw earlier than usual, still trying to figure out the best timing, and they took it - and stuck it. At the trail to the lower Rosie Creek crossing, against my better judgement, I slowed the sled and called them to gee onto the trail. I had, after all, spent a chunk of my morning down there with a snow shovel hacking away at the now iced-in berm to make the trail and turn more obvious. Apparently the work was in vain. Norrin and Billie looked left and right blankly, then tried to charge ahead against my brake. With nowhere to hook in and keeping Norrin's stress level low as a the highest priority for this run, I didn't linger. We stuck to the road and headed down to the trail past the Quist Farm.

We ran out the flat trail below the bluffs, along the valley carved by the out-of-sight Tanana river. We passed the furthest point we'd reached so far this season, and kept on trucking west. There were a few enticing right-hand trails that seemed well traveled, but I decided to keep left and see where that would take us. If the flagging along this route is from trappers, they are probably having a good season. I've never seen as many ermine and snowshoe hare tracks as I did today, crisscrossing the trail like lace. The further out we went, the more moose tracks I saw (and fresh!) giving me good reason to keep my eyes on the trees around us. After eight and some change miles, we came to a huge, perfectly groomed highway of a trail. I stopped the team, hooked into the deep snow and gave everyone a good ear rub while eying this spectacular new possibility. It came from the direction of the river and continued west, but where exactly it came from or who maintained it was a grand mystery. At any rate, we were at the end of our rope for the day. I hauled the team around, noting that Billie and Norrin were as reluctant to turn as Reese was eager, which caused nearly as bad a tangle in the end. But tangles are fixable, and with a well set hook I wasn't in a sweat about working out some knots.
 We headed home with the sun setting behind us, and the first solid long (for us) run of the season finally under the runners.

Despite the fact that it had warmed to twenty below zero and I was bundled to the gills, I found myself struggling with bone-chilling cold on the run home. After three years, I felt like I had a good handle on exactly how many layers I needed to stay warm at different temperatures, but I'm realizing now that those parameters need to be revised. For the last two winters, I've been running small teams. With less power available even for the mildest of hills, those runs required a lot more work from me to keep the sled moving. And this season with a bigger team, those same layering strategies have worked because of intermittent crises that involve getting off the sled and hauling dogs and lines around and floundering in the snow. But now that I've had a taste of a couple straight hours on the runners, encouraging and steering but mostly just riding for the first time ... well ... ever, my cold-mitigation strategy is going to have to change. You're not going to catch me complaining about it, though. Despite shivering hard though the last three miles of the run, I was riding a cloud of elation all the way home.