Newsletter
The dogs looked exceptional considering the environment that surrounded us. They charged forward as if to tell me not to worry everything was going to be just fine. At that time I promised them that we would take a 12-hour rest in Eagle Island and I would make sure everyone ate at least three meals. This young team already had learned to trust me. They knew if and when we made it to Eagle Island that I would take good care of them and give them a warm bed of straw to sleep on.
The sun was setting and the light was fading. This is when I realized that the missing trail markers made it hard to navigate during the day but it was going to make it next to impossible at night. I could not think that stopping until dawn would make things easier but where would we stop. There would be no benefit to stopping and camping in this wind. We would need to find shelter. No, I was not going to break a promise. Was it me or the dogs that could not make it? As I studied my team it was obvious that I was the weak link at the time and although I had plenty of dog food to spend the night I did not have any straw for bedding. Why should they sleep without straw? I needed to step up like they have been for me and do what it takes to find the trail and get my team to the checkpoint. I struggled for hours and hours. I would stop and walk up front. Shine my headlamp ahead to try and find another trail marker. The tricky part was I would occasionally pick up the reflective tape from a broken marker that had blown across the river. This makes for a lot of zigzag patterns. No mater what direction I shined my light into all I saw was black. There was nothing to see. Just a wide-open river. This went on for about five hours. My dogs were starting to slow down and I was wearing thin. It was not so much the fact that we had been on the trail for 12 hours as it was what we had been doing in that time. I mean a 12 hour run is a really long run but these conditions made it feel more like days. For the first time since dark I saw some trees about 100 yards to our left and caught a glimpse of an upright trail marker, which was reassuring. At this point I was happy to see a trail marker every 15 or 20 minutes apart. Since it became dark I was not able to judge my speed. Not having run the race before I had no sense of how far we had remaining to Eagle Island. It was sensory deprivation and I was exhausted. The dogs were starting to want to shut down and I needed to find a place out of the wind to stop. It was no longer about promises and being tough. It was time to stop. As we got closer to the trees I shined my light to look for a spot where we could get up the 10 foot bank onto land. We now were only about 35 feet from shore. My dogs were trying to run up the bank. They were ready. But there was no way. We needed somewhat of a natural ramp. I searched hard, stopped several times to walk ahead and but I could not find any access off the river. We began to go around a bend in the river and all of a sudden I saw about 50 trail markers. Was I hallucinating? What was going on? Did some snow machine pick a bunch of trail markers up and make a pile? What was this? We traveled directly towards them. This meant the dogs saw them as well. That was a good sign. I was not hallucinating. Once we were about 50 yards away I saw something behind the markers. It looked like a small tent. It was a sign of life but it certainly did not look like a checkpoint. Someone would have seen my light by now and shined theirs at me. As we got closer I saw a stack of straw. It was the checkpoint.