From Karin Hendrickson Part Three – More Scary Stuff
We stop at Rohn for four hours and take off around 5:30 in the morning following a pack of about 10 teams who all took off some time after 5:00.
I expect a rough ride – the Burn is always rough. There is not a scrap of snow on the trail, although there is plenty of frozen mud and ice. I leave with all the dogs except the two wheel dogs clipped just to their collars, hoping that will help reduce the power to manageable levels.
Right off the bat Elway breaks his line. The dog is always breaking something, so it is no great surprise. He shoots down the trail, gleefully skipping from side to side, stopping right in the way to sniff and pee, charging at a full gallop down the dark trail, and darting off on side trails. The rest of the team want to go with him on his mad dash, and I have my hands full keeping control on the frozen ruts and roots.
I’m not worried I will lose him, but I have no way to stop and get him back where he belongs. And he is not making the team any easier to handle. We scramble after him for several miles. There is simply nowhere I can set a hook to hold the team while I clip him into the line. In fact, there isn’t anywhere I have enough braking power to stop in the first place. We tear down the trail after him, slaloming through dark woods and then slamming down onto river ice and gravel bars. Finally on the other side of the river I manage to stop the team and snag a tree with my hook and collect the thoroughly pleased Elway back into the team.
I am working my tail off to stay on top of the sled and avoid obstacles. There is nothing but glare ice, frozen ruts, ledges, drop offs, stumps, rocks, logs, gravel, tussocks, uneven clumps of roots, side hills, clumps of roots on side hills, glare ice on side hills… you get the picture. And every bit of it frozen dirt or ice; no snow in sight. The sled bounces off obstacles, slams into holes, crashes over stumps, and batters its way down the ‘trail’.
My brake and drag are almost useless, as there is nothing for them to bite into. I am still slamming them hard, caution to the wind, knowing that one or both is going to be torn from the sled at any moment and make a desperate situation even worse. But I am desperate for a shred of control as my sled careens back and forth, most of the time only on one runner. Like in the Dalzell, it is case of die now, or die later, and my instincts to control my sled has me jumping on the brake.
The dogs are feeling energetic, to put it mildly. We are flying. Not that I need any proof to tell me that we are travelling too fast, but we pass team after team. Many are pulled over, dealing with broken sleds or other problems.
The wild ride just doesn’t let up. There isn’t a single place flat enough to relax for more than a second or two before I am once again clinging to the edge of control, fighting to get the sled on both runners. And once again I am terrified. At the speed we are travelling, a crash into the stumps and rocks is going to cause injury; possibly serious injury.
I am really getting a workout; my heart rate is through the roof, I am gasping for air, and I the sweat is pouring off my face and freezing as it splashes off my jacket. I don’t dare take any of my ‘padding’ off to cool down, so I am completely soaked through with sweat. I don’t dare stop to catch my breath because the hooligans strapped to the front of the sled don’t need any time to wind themselves up into a bigger frenzy and run even harder.
The dogs are learning that “Oh ****” (insert expletive of choice) means the same as “whoa”. This will do me absolutely no good, because right now they are not interested in slowing down or whoa-ing for any reason. Farther down the trail, when the dogs have mellowed a bit, when the trail is not so desperate, when I am not at the edge of exhaustion just keeping the sled on its runners, a cry of “Oh ****” will bring the dogs to a halt. But for now the throttle is stuck wide open and all I can do is hang on.
The trail is littered with runner plastic, water bottles, coolers, and other items that have been torn from, or rattled out of sleds. So far I haven’t lost a thing, but I also have only had a couple minor tip overs, and no serious crashes. After a couple of hours we jump down off a two foot drop onto a gravel bar, skitter across glare ice, and head up the far bank. The bank is steep, maybe three feet high, and has a side angle. Despite the dogs pulling strong, my sled slides off to the right and keeps grinding along the sand and gravel bank that keeps getting higher and higher. Now my sled is nearly vertical and the bank is as high as my eight foot runners. I am not too worried about being stuck because Charlie Benja is not too far behind me and I know he can help me shove the sled up the bank.
The dogs are going to get a short break after all, but then, so am I. And I need it. We are two hours into a long run, and I’m shaking with fatigue, drenched with sweat, and at the end of my endurance. I sip some water and focus on breathing. I am a bit down on myself for being so out of shape, and wonder if it is going to be the reason I get hurt or destroy my sled. Then Charlie comes up and shares the same miseries with me. He is most definitely not out of shape, and I start to feel better about my fitness. Even if it doesn’t make the trail any easier, Charlie’s cheerful help getting my sled over the ledge makes everything seem better.
The trail doesn’t actually get better. It just keeps going on and on and on, at the limits of my abilities, for mile after mile. We tear up the Post River Glacier, a steep ice cliff, and across the rubble of rocks at the top. We fling over the giant dirt humps that always lurk in the buffalo chutes and they actually seem like a friendly familiar face on this horrendous trail. We ping pong over mine-fields of tussocks. We slew around sharp corners on side hill frozen dirt cluttered with roots and stumps. We slam through holes and drops and over rocks.
I need to watch the dogs, watch the trail for what is coming up. But if I take my focus off the trail immediately in front of me for more than a split second, I am in for disaster. I take a micro-glance ahead and see my dogs waver, wobble, and then dart to the left. In front of them is a hole. They swoop around the bank and back to the middle of the trail, and I can see my sled is going to be dragged right into the hole. I jam on the brakes and somehow we stop. I stomp the hooks into some cracks in the frozen mud and take a closer look. This is not a hole, it’s a crater. It’s a sinkhole. An opening in the earth big enough to swallow a minivan, maybe even a school bus. It is huge! It is deep! I do NOT want to drag behind my sled and wind up at the bottom of this hole!
Once we are stopped, I know I have this one under control. Carefully I take one hook and move it forward and to the side a foot. Then I carefully remove the hook holding the dogs back. They jerk forward, but my side-hook holds. I place the next hook up and over, and then creep forward again. We move, crab-wise, a foot at a time, around the edge of the giant grave-hole until all the dogs, the sled, and I are on the far side. Then we take off again at a run!
Somewhere along the line a few hours out, the bed of the sled rides up over a tree stump, skidding along on top of it. On the far side, the stump comes popping out from under my sled and snags my brake. We lurch to a stop, then break free and keep going. For some reason, the brake is still attached to the sled. But now it is cockeyed, twisted off to the side so far that the right hand claw is hitting my runner. It’s not going to do me much good like that. I can spend some time trying to straighten it back out, but usually if you bend metal around too much it will just break. Since I’m already using my replacement brake I’m not too sure what I am going to do, but I don’t have much time to worry about it since I am now left with just the drag matt to keep the dogs in check.
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