Twisting Trails
Last night our blogging crew slept on the new stage at the Finland Community Center. The guys were a little upset when I told them we could have spent the night at a hotel in Tofte. By the time I awoke, the lead pack was already on the way to Tofte. In the predawn dark, the Finland Checkpoint was a whirlwind of activity. Little headlamp lights danced around as mushers, officials and handlers moved about doing the tasks of dog racing.
Calculating rest time is a particular struggle for the dog tired mushers. They don’t want to spend any more time in the checkpoint than they need to, but figuring out the 8 hour rest plus differential less the time they spent in Two Harbors and then adding that to their Finland in time is confusing without sleep. I see them sitting at the tables in the gym scratching away these calculations on napkins and scraps of paper.
Dave Turner has now won the mid-distance race. Maggie Heilmann came in a very respectable second place. Congratulations to all the mid-distance finishers. Simply going from Duluth to Tofte by dog team is a huge accomplishment. The speed of the mid-distance race gets faster and faster every year and the margin for error gets less and less. Even the teams at the rear of the race are running faster every year. One musher commented that his team gets better each year, but so does everyone else. He wants to run this year’s team in last year’s race. I’m not sure how to pull that one off.
According to race officials, the marathon teams are now “rockin’ into Sawbill.” I’m told that Jamie Nelson and Peter McClelland were the first teams to into Sawbill. With the rest the marathon teams have to take, it is hard to tell who is really leading the race. Normally, a leader isn’t established until they make the turnaround back toward Duluth.
In other news, two marathon teams, Tom Roley and Tom Bauer, missed a turn and lost at least ½ an hour going down the wrong trail. It sounds like a sign marking the turn fell down. Still, the other 13 teams made the turn. Anyway, the two teams then returned to Beaver Bay for a 6 hour rest since their team had run for 9 hours. They are now at least 10 hours behind the rest of the teams. I can relate to those guys because we took the back way from Finland to Tofte and missed our turn. We went about half way to Isabella and missed the winner of the mid-distance race finish.
The trail conditions remain super. The snow banks are above the height of my car. The temperatures dropped down to -6 F at dawn, but have since climbed back up to zero.
Today our focus will change from the mid-distance race to the marathon. We’ll head up to Sawbill and Trail Center this afternoon. We will try to keep adding as much content to the blog as possible, but it is hard to do in some of the more remote sections of the trail.
