At about 7:45am I hit the trail and they closed the Sourdough checkpoint behind me. The trail left the creek and crossed under the pipeline once again and then climbed a short hill and emerged on this plateau with a wide open trail corridor and trail that was in great shape. It was getting cold even as the sun was coming up and since we were out of the valley on this plateau I got great views of the Wrangle Mountains to the Southeast and the Alaska Range to the North. It was looking to be a blue sky day and I was looking forward to doing a little running in the daylight since the previous 130 miles had been all at night.As the trail continued along this ridge, I started to get a little concerned about my feet and how I wasn't able to keep them very warm even with doing a little jig on the sled runners. A few hours into the run I sensed the topography changing and figured we'd soon be dropping off this plateau and down onto the lakes. I decided that if I wasn't able to keep my feet warm up there, it was going to only get harder as we dropped down onto the lakes, so I decided I needed to make a stop. I realized that I probably hadn't gotten my socks completely dry at Sourdough and since I hadn't changed them there, there was probably a bit of sweat which my feet just weren't able to keep warm.

So, again having the luxury of not worrying about someone coming behind me, I stopped the team in the middle of the trail and dug out an extra set of liner socks, wool socks and a pile of chemical hand warmers. I was determined not to have to change my boot liners too, and figured that if I put enough chemical warmers in, I'd be fine. Well, it mostly worked and my feet eventually warmed up. However, it does take a while for those chemicals to heat up, especially since they were starting off frozen solid in sub zero temps. I took advantage of my stop and tried to snack the dogs, but they weren't very interested in the usual turkey skins or race diet and just rested instead.

We got moving again and started our descent to the first lake. It was a beautiful morning with clear blue skies once again and no fog, even down on the lake. It was cold though, and I was glad that I had taken the time to stop and change socks. We cruised across the first lake and the trail wandered through the woods a little and then came out on lake number two. This was a fairly good sized lake with an assortment of stakes and barrels set out on the ice and as we made our way out on the ice I realized that they were the markings of a landing strip and then noticed the one cabin on the lake, but no plane along the shore. What a quiet get-away that cabin must be…

We climbed up off that lake and wound our way through some more scrub spruce forests and then finally dropped down onto what I quickly realized was Crosswinds Lake. We had been warned about this lake and were told that the trail was marked well across the lake, but be careful because there was not much more than a layer of frost covering the ice. That was a pretty accurate description, but Curly and Kali who I had running in lead at this point seemed not to mind and were following the trail quite easily.

One of the mainstays on the Copper Basin is the Soup Lady on Crosswinds Lake. This was a volunteer who would give some soup to any musher who was kind enough to stop as the trail passed right in front of their cabin on the lake. As I was running in last place and well behind the front runners, I wasn't counting on getting any soup, but was hoping that I would at least get a sense of how many miles into the run we were and as a result how far we had yet to go.

Well, as we made our way across the rather large lake I saw an individual ambling out onto the lake ice and sure enough as we got closer I saw that while it wasn't a Soup Lady, it was a Soup Man and he had a cup of bean and bacon stew in one hand and a cup of water in the other. Yes!

Curly and Kali got excited too and thought they were going to check out the guy's cabin and driveway and maybe he had a dog truck back there which they could all load up into and then go home. I had to explain that we weren't quite there yet and ended up switching out Gertie for Kali so I had a leader I could trust to find the trail leading out of this pit stop. Once the team was lined out and stopped, I eagerly slurped down the soup and downed the water with great appreciation. In between mouthfuls I chatted with the Soup Man and found out that Lance Mackey had already crossed the finish line in Glennallen.

I was happy for Lance and didn't dwell on the fact that I was still out in the middle of Crosswinds Lake enjoying a cup of soup and chatting up a storm with this kind Alaskan. He gave me the scoop on the rest of the trail to the Wolverine checkpoint on Lake Louise and I found out I still had 25 miles to go. It was past noon and I was a little dismayed about how long this run was taking me. But it sounded like the trail ahead was in good shape and well marked… "a few small hills and then you come to the top and look down and there it will be: big Lake Louise".

The Soup Man helped the team leave the pit stop on the right exit trail and not up his driveway and we were off once again. We climbed a little bit, dropped down a hill or two and then climbed again. After a second climb we had a pretty good of the surrounding landscape and I thought I might have seen the lake, but was badly mistaken. We had a ways to go yet and this last stretch of trail did a number on my mental state. I was doing the math wrong in my head and had somehow added a couple extra hours to this current run and as a result was getting pretty down on myself and the dogs, thinking that they just weren't fast enough to compete.

This stretch of trail also was frustrating as it was straight as an arrow following the section line leading to Lake Louise. I had come to accept the fact at this point that dog sled trails don't necessarily follow the contours or take a gradual route up a slope. Often times they just go straight up. We would climb and climb up this straight section of trail and crest the hill, look down and ahead and sure enough you could see the trail straight ahead climbing yet another hill. The dogs kept digging in as we approached every hill, but Curly must have given it a little too much on one of the hills as he developed a slight limp as we got close to Lake Louise.

Finally we crested one last hill and true to the Soup Man's word we saw all of Lake Louise spread out across the landscape. It was a huge lake and I was quite glad to be finally starting across its icy surface. I had always thought of Lake Louise being at the bottom of this big bowl and that is why it gets so cold. However as I was crossing it in the late afternoon light I swiveled around on the runners and could see all of the surrounding mountains off in the distance and not much in the foreground. It actually was more of a perched lake and it seemed like we had climbed quite a bit to get there.

There were many trails crisscrossing the lake, but once again, the trail groomers had marked it well and it was fairly easy to find our way across the lake to Wolverine Lodge and the last major checkpoint and layover of the race for me. I arrived at about 3:30pm and still had a bit of day light left to check out the surroundings. I was cold and a bit grumpy coming into the checkpoint and said to JJ something to the effect of it being a "painfully slow run". She said something to the contrary and I assumed she had just been trying to be encouraging. It sunk in a little later that I actually had had a pretty good run and had run that leg faster than one other musher and at a comparable speed to a few others. That's when I realized my +2 hours mistake and started to feel a little better about myself and the dogs.

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