Frank comes into the Grand Marais, MI checkpoint.

Sled dogs are remarkable creatures.  Just two days after returning home from the Beargrease the dogs were all bouncing back.  The season was not even half over and we had been through so much. After the Beargrease the team needed to convalesce for a week, followed by some short easy runs.  Initially it wasn’t clear if we were going to race again this year but the dogs clearly had other ideas.  By the week of the UP 200 we had 12 dogs that were ready to make the trip to Michigan.

The nighttime downtown Marquette Michigan start is best one of any race we have done.  (Click here to view a full photo gallery from the race at their website.) Seven thousand cheering people line the streets.  Being the third team out of the chute, we soon were leading the race out of Marquette.  The week before the race saw 50 degree days and some rain leaving the trail along Lake Superior in rough shape, pretty much all just frozen gravel.  There were some reroutes around the worst sections that were poorly marked.  After 60 miles we came into the first checkpoint, still in the front but with little plastic on the bottom of our sled runners. We had traveled a few extra miles due to several wrong turns.

Frank puts booties on Cowboy.

The Wetmore checkpoint is unassisted so we were on our own there for about five hours.  The dogs were still wound up and even though it was the middle of the night, I wondered if the dogs would settle down to sleep at all.  After feeding them, taking off their shredded dog booties, putting down straw for them lay down on and covering them with blankets, they started to settle down.

There’s a small building at Wetmore where the veterinarians, timers and radio operators stay.  The first leg results were posted showing that even though we came in first, some teams behind me actually had faster first run times.  We were in fourth place and only a couple of minutes behind the leaders.

I was planning on staying in Wetmore no more than five hours.  As my planned departure time came, no other teams were ready to leave.  It was clear that with such a challenging trail, nobody wanted to lead.   It was now snowing and the winds were gusting to 50 miles an hour causing total whiteouts.  I had planned to only rest at Wetmore five hours and had good leaders so we hit the trail again, the first team out of the chute.

Snowmobiles had gone ahead two hours before but the blowing snow had completely covered their tracks.  The trail was poorly marked and I couldn’t see the trail signs until they were just feet in front of my face, far too late to call to the dogs to turn.  Turning the team around for the sixth or seventh time I got back to the trail to find a team waiting for me to again break the trail.  I’d had enough.  He could lead.  I was going to snack my dogs.  I stopped and Rene and his team passed on the trail.  We followed less than a minute behind only to find Rene camped out on the side of the trail snacking his dogs.  Clearly he didn’t want to lead either.  We passed him in tight spot of the trail and caught his sled runner in my sled, bending it a bit and flipping his sled over.

“What the hell, dammit you busted my sled.”

It wasn’t really broken and as I left him back there I was laughing.  Served him right for not taking a turn at leading.

The trail dumped us out onto a gravel logging road that the falling snow was just blowing off of.  I spent the next 6 miles running next to and tipping the sled up on its side trying to conserve my sled runner plastic.  When we finally got off the road and onto a snow covered trail again, I found that the sled no longer had any plastic.  We were running on the aluminum runners, which pretty much stick to the snow.  We slowed way down.  A few teams passed us with runner plastic intact.  They had either brought extra in their sleds or had better quality than we did,  another expensive lesson.

Bart

Jake

Storm.

As we were about to leave the checkpoint, Moo and Storm started to bark and lunge.  Soon the whole team was jumping and barking to go.  The sun was setting as we left Grand Marais for the return trip to Marquette.  Fly, Acorn, Tina and Esther hadn’t fully recovered from the Beargrease, so they didn’t make the trip to Michigan.  Ben, who had a sore shoulder, and Gnasher, who was running his first race, were going to stay behind with Sherri at the Grand Marais, Michigan checkpoint.  This still left us with ten strong dogs for the last run of the race.  We were leaving in 7^th place out of 18 of the best sled dog teams in the country.  Of course we’d like to be winning, or close to it, but coming off our trial at the Beargrease and leaving several of our best dogs at home, we were happy to be in the race at all.

As the full moon rose through the partly cloudy sky. the Upper Peninsula woods opened up.  Turning off my headlamp I could see like it was midday.  For the next five hours we didn’t see another team.  It was just me and ten of my best friends doing what we loved to do best, what we had worked all year for, racing down a moonlit trail.

We finished in a respectable 7^th place and spent the drive home planning for the next two races in Ely, Minnesota and Maine.  Plenty of racing still to do and we now have a full-strength healthy team to do it.