Expeditions

I apologize for the long radio silence! We’re back from our spring expeditions with lots of stories and photos to share!

Huge snowdrifts!

One of our adventures was with a mother/daughter duo. We had last taken them on a trip when the daughter was a freshman in high school. Now she was graduating and selecting a college! It was a blast to catch up and learn about her senior year during the time of Covid. On their last expedition, we had traveled around the Chena River Valley. During one of the nights, we stayed on top of Trapline Mountain during a windstorm and ended up bringing all the dogs into a 19ft in diameter yurt! While it wasn’t a very restful night, the mother/daughter duo said it was a highlight of the trip. This time we would be traveling to the Denali Highway. And wouldn’t you know it, Mother Nature had something to say about this trip as well! The adventure was delayed due to record snowfall in Fairbanks, then we had two glorious days, which were followed by two days of exceptionally high winds. Reading the forecast (-50F with windchill, 30-35 mph gusts) I knew that those just weren’t conditions that one would call a vacation. Luckily, we were holed up at Alpine Creek Lodge, and they made room for us to stay an extra two days! Bonus! As we mushed out after the storm, we crossed drifts that were at least twelve feet high caused by the wind!

All the photos in the above gallery were taken by Kalyn Holl Photography

At the very end of the season, we went on our annual arctic caribou hunt. This year, the crew was comprised of Kalyn (who you all know), May (good friend who has accompanied me on this hunt the past two years), Nick (my elder brother from Colorado), and Jessie (a new friend from Wyoming who owns a horsepacking outfit in the Wind River Mountains). Prior to this trip, my mom had actually spent more time with Jessie during the 2018 Yukon Quest when my mom was handling for the Ryno Team and Jessie was handling for Tim Pappas. In addition to the five humans, we had twenty six RK athletes going on the adventure: Goblin, Smoky, Thresher, Bert, Ernie, Tobin, Watson, Sherlock, Otis, Bull, Boone, Etta, Yoshi, Dolly, Scarpa, Faff, Mario, Rose, Wombat, Maple, Louie, Oryx, Wingman, Elmer, Bowser, and Avie (May’s dog). Basically we were a traveling circus.

We spent five invigorating days exploring the Arctic, mushing in extreme conditions, and spotting caribou, wolves, and even muskox! Each day brought so much adventure, excitement, and unending thrills that as we left the Arctic to head south, we sighed in contentment thinking the adventures were over.

Little did we know, the trailer tire had other plans. We’d been driving for hours and only had about 1.5 hours until home when I noticed a strange, dragging noise. I pulled to the shoulder of the road, hopped out of truck, and walked around to the trailer. “Uh oh….” I said. “We have a problem.”

Yep, as you can see from the photo, we had a problem. The tire had completely disintegrated, and the rim had warped around the hub. Oops. Apparently we had been driving like that for awhile. Initially, I was pretty embarrassed that I hadn’t noticed the issue sooner; however, after talking to other people who have driven the Dalton Highway or other long dirt roads, I was reassured that I’m not the only one to have had this issue. Apparently it can be challenging to detect on a trailer.

As we stared in awe at the rim and hub, May exclaimed, “this calls for lipstick!” May had brought pink and red lipstick on the trip and insisted that we all wore lipstick throughout the day. Why? I have no idea, but since I haven’t worn lipstick since my senior prom, it was a fun ritual. With a fresh coat of lipstick on everyone (including Nick), we got to work. Jessie, Kalyn, and Nick began unloading the sleds from the trailer and reloading them onto the dog box of the truck. May ran back down the road to see if she could find the tire, which was a futile task. I stared at the hub, hoping for inspiration. “Well,” I said, “Let’s see if we can take the rim off. It only seems to be molded on a couple sides. Maybe we can wiggle the rim off.” I’m glad I couldn’t see the massive flaws in my plan, otherwise I would have written off the entire endeavor as hopeless. With a bottle jack, we lifted the trailer and began to take off the lugnuts. It was quite a struggle, but using two sets of hands on the tire iron, we managed to get them all off. I did a brief wiggle of the rim and realized that there was no way we could finagle the rim off the hub. “Perhaps a trucker has a metal sawzall in their truck?!” I said hopefully.

With a fresh coat of lipstick, May and Jessie began flagging down truckers. Most would quickly shake their head and speed away, until one truck pulled up behind us. The trucker popped his head out of the window and said, “I’ll come take a look.” Long story short, Sean (nicknamed Two Dog due to having a Labrador and Weimaraner on his first truck) took the entire hub off the trailer and spent almost three hours bashing on the rim, finally freeing the hub! At one point, there were four semis backed up around us, everyone chit-chatting and slowing down to ask Two Dog what was going on. He’d proudly hold up the warped rim, which always received a PHEW! Good Luck! from the passing trucker.

A big thank you to Two Dog for getting us moving down the road! May asked if he would like a celebratory coat of lipstick, to which he said, “No thanks, but it makes sense why everyone has lipstick on now! Including Nick!” Ha! Nick was getting some strange looks from the truckers as they passed!

We didn’t trust the trailer, so we loaded all 26 dogs, 5 humans, and 5 sleds into the truck! But for some reason, that felt like the perfect way to end such an incredible adventure. And yes, we did bring home some meat for the freezer too!

Post Race and Sleeping

Photo by Whitney McLaren

I apologize for the radio silence, but phew, we’ve been rocking and rolling! When finishing in Nome, you often have to wait at least a couple days until the banquet. Sleeping, relaxing, eating. While I have enjoyed skipping out on the normal banquet hubbub, I did miss the forced relaxation. This year, we finished in the morning. We had breakfast with our dropped dog crew (Tyler and Kelsey), then immediately drove home to Two Rivers. The next day I relaxed inside and hung with the dogs. But that was it. The following day we jumped into tours and catching up on every day life. To be honest, I haven’t even had time to really think about the race beyond watching a couple videos. Occasionally, little snippets of moments come flooding back, but honestly, I’ve had to focus on the next task at hand. I’d say that the dogs have rebounded faster than me. As I type, I’m watching out the window as they body slam each other, chew on their houses, dig in the snow, and wonder why we went from running hundreds of miles to only doing 10-15. I definitely feel a little dog guilt, but luckily, they’re headed out for an expedition on the Denali Highway starting Monday. That should could them happy!

All that being said, I do plan to share stories and write a dog recap. It just might take me a few weeks, so thank you ahead of time for your patience! Each night as I crawl into bed, I do think about how I want to write about napping on the Iditarod. How if it’s cold, I would crawl in my sleeping bag with all my clothes and boots on. I typically lie on my chest and one hip, curling my arms underneath my body and cocooning my head in both my parka ruff and sleeping bag. I would try to make the perfect air hole that allowed oxygen into my cave, but not so much cold air that my nose got cold. But when sleeping in a warm cabin, like Skwentna or Iditarod, woooeee! Those were moments of paradise. I’d lie flat on my back, one arm outstretched over my head, soaking in the warmth as if I was in a lawn chair on the beach. I can’t normally sleep on my back, but in the middle of the race in a hot cabin, for whatever reason, it was my favorite. There are few times in my life when falling asleep has felt as glorious as napping in a hot cabin on a thousand mile race.

Another sleeping story- it was near the end of the race. I had been traveling more or less with Paige since Nikolai (inbound). We ran though the middle of the night, picked up supplies in Rainy Pass, and then mushed a bit farther until we pulled over to camp on the side of the trail. We had our alarms set for a 3:50 AM wake up call. As the alarm sounded, I started pulling myself out of my cocoon of warmth. Paige was nearby, and I heard her say, “Let’s stay in the sleeping bag just 10 more minutes”. RED FLAG. Never ever give yourself just a few more minutes of sleep. That is a slippery, slippery slope. But Paige typically beats me in a thousand mile race, so I thought, what could be the harm? Forty minutes later, I jump out of the sleeping bag and say- “PAIGE! We have to get up!!” She crawls out of her sleeping bag and says, “Let’s just go home. I’m cold. This isn’t fun anymore.” To which I replied, “Paige, we can’t go home. We’re on a race.” She gives me a quizzical look and says, “we are?” At this point, I thought she was just teasing. She asks, “Which race are we on?” “We’re on the Iditarod, Paige!” Paige responds, “huh, where are we?” “We’re on our way to Skwentna,” I say. She looks extra confused now, which is understandable since it is strange to be returning to Skwentna. She says, “ok…so…what should I do now?” “Well,” I say, “let’s starting packing up to leave and get to the finish!” Shortly after this conversation, Paige has cleared out the cobwebs, and she was quickly prepping the team to leave. But for the rest of the race, this memory brought us lots of laughs!