The
Climb
I decided to not put new booties on all the dogs as I knew there were a
few more water crossings up the trail a little bit and wanted to see how this
consistency of snow would wear on their feet. A few miles down the trail I
did end up putting a few booties on those dogs with more tender feet, especially
the hard pulling dogs, due to the hill climbing we'd soon be doing.
As we climbed up out of the Excelsior Creek drainage, the full moon was illuminating
the Alaska Range in a bright light. It was truly magnificent with the range
spread out as far as I could see to the North and West and stretching on behind
me on the East. I almost forgot that we were starting to climb, but was quickly
brought back to reality as I looked out ahead and my headlamp picked up the
reflective trail markers climbing up and up and up a treeless ridge which
I had seen back along the trail and had fairly quickly dismissed as being
too high for the trail to go up. I was mistaken.
So we all put our heads down and started up, me kicking on the runners and
the dogs digging in with their bootieless paws. Every once in a while we'd
get to a steep enough section of trail that I couldn't put any weight on the
runners or they would slow to a stop. In those steep sections I'd have to
run behind the sled and look longingly for the next shelf or level section
of trail to jump back on the runners and catch my breath.
We climbed for about 1.5 hours and finally we were at the top. To the North
lay the Alaska Range in all its winter grandeur. To the south the sky was
clouding up and I could see the weather was changing a bit. The moon was still
bright enough to see the landscape in amazing detail and even make out the
trail beyond the beam of my headlamp.
As we were floating along this magical section of trail, I was startled back
to reality by a dog named Mars who was running along in the middle of the
team. Mars is a tiny dog, probably weighing about 45 lbs, but is built like
a barrel and pulls like a train. She is really just a sweetheart on the team
and at just 2.5 years old she probably has many races in front of her. This
was her first official race, and she was still learning some of the ropes
of being a sled dog, such as how not to dip snow.
Dogs tend to dip snow off the trail or the side of the trail as they get thirsty
while running. Some dogs do this without interrupting the flow of the team.
Others, like Mars, launch themselves into the snowbank on the side of the
trail and get a mouthful of snow that way. 
Mars
was the most dramatic of all the dogs on my team when it came to dipping snow
and it did occasionally disrupt the team as she stumbled around in the deep
snow a bit. As we were crossing this high point on the trail we were well
above tree line and while the main trail had set up with a solid surface,
the snow just adjacent to the trail was deep and bottomless. Mars found this
out as she launched herself off the trail and literally disappeared from view.
Had it not been for her neckline which pulled her back to the surface, I'm
not sure what would have happened. She stumbled back onto the trail and literally
shook herself off a few times before settling into her harness once again.
I guess it was what she needed to break her of the bad habit, as that was
the last launch off the trail Mars did for the rest of the race.
We cruised along the summit above tree line and the dogs easily followed the
trail of the previous mushers to the western edge where we started our descent
to the Gakona River. Just as we started down I saw out on the river a few
miles away about three separate headlamps bobbing this way and that way. I
hoped the reason I was seeing the mushers facing back up the trail was that
they were at the water crossings and just turned around as they were getting
their dogs across the open water. I hoped that what I wasn't seeing was mushers
off the trail, wandering around trying to find their way across the river
through a maze of open water and thin ice. Unfortunately I had had plenty
of time for my imagination to work up various scenarios leading up to this
river crossing.
But I still had to get down to the river and this meant dropping down a few
more chutes of powdery snow which the dogs wallowed through. The typical crossing
of the Gakona wasn't usable this year due to a stretch of open water so we
had to detour through some scrub brush along the bank downstream about a mile
before dropping down onto the river and traveling a few miles back upstream
on the ice. Even though I've spent a bit of time on ice, fishing and traveling
by dog sled, I still was a bit nervous because of the size of the river and
braided nature of the channel here.
We made it across the main channel and then had a few more narrow leads of
open water which the dogs could almost clear with a big leap. Only on the
last crossing did I not have to lead the first dogs of the team across by
hand. Here I was able to give Curly and Dale enough encouragement from the
sled to take us across. I knew we were finally on the other side when the
trail was all of a sudden littered with booties. Anyone who hadn't taken booties
off for those crossings had to shed them now and some mushers didn't take
as much time to throw them all into the sled to take with them. But for me
it signified dry trail until just one more crossing about 10 miles away.
The trail crawled up the bank and we curled around another hill until we came
up underneath the Pipeline. After 50 some miles of nothing but a few dog booties
and trail markers along the trail, the pipeline greeted us as a very artificial
feature in the landscape. I greeted it with some enthusiasm however, as I
had remembered it as another milestone on this stretch of trail. I remembered
I now had to travel the pipeline for about 10 miles and then I'd drop down
onto Summit Lake. From there it was just about 10 more miles to the Paxson
checkpoint. The pipeline was also an unmistakable sign that I was doing something
truly Alaskan in the heart of Alaska.
