Adding Daylight

Most of January wasn't all that exciting. I got sick one week. I guess cold and dark would the best way to describe it, but we were gaining daylight every day. I woke up one morning to -17F temperatures outside and a broken heater inside. That was one of the coldest days we had had all winter at my house, where it is warmer than it is in town, so it figured that the heater would have picked that day to go kaput. Luckily it was a Sunday morning, and my landlord wasn't busy, so he came right over to fix it. It never got colder than 45F in the house, so I was grateful. It could have been far worse.


Speaking of heat, I got the fuel tank filled in January. $1,317.71 later I shouldn't have to worry about fuel again for quite a while.


February became more active with increasing temperatures and even more daylight hours. I rented the Chena River Cabin the weekend of the Yukon Quest.





The Yukon Quest is similar to the Iditarod (~1000 miles), but it is less commercial and is billed as the toughest sled dog race in the world. The race alternates start/finish lines every year between Fairbanks, Alaska, and Whitehorse, Yukon. This year the start was in Fairbanks, and my friend Paige was mushing in a shorter version of the race that covered the first 300 miles of the trail. What better reason did we need to stand out in the middle of the woods next to the trail cheering on the mushers? In years past, we had already seen the start of the race on the river downtown, so we were looking for a new angle on things (so to speak).

I found out where the trail went, rented the cabin, and invited people to come on out and cheer on the dog teams. The trail was about a mile or two from the cabin, so it wasn't that big of a deal to travel back and forth. We started at the cabins with two snowmachines hauling sleds full of firewood, lawn chairs, beer, water, snacks, and a few passengers and headed out to our viewing point.


Melissa was appropriately dressed for the cold in fur(ish?) hat and gloves along with rainbow scarf.


We arrived at the trail without a clue if any mushers had gone by yet or not, nor whether they would be showing up soon or not. Good thing the weather was nice outside for the wait.


I think it took about forty minutes for the first musher to come by, Brent Sass, and we later found out that he was indeed the first musher past our location that day, so I'm glad we didn't go out there any earlier.

It was socializing time between dog teams, catching up with people we hadn't seen in a while and trying to guess how many dog teams had already gone by and which ones they were and who would be the next musher to pass through.


I'm sure we were quite a surprise when a musher did go by. So much for running dogs in the peaceful wilderness without any one around but the trees. It quickly became too dark to take pictures. I didn't want to use the flash for fear of scaring some dogs off the trail. I did manage to get a couple of low light pictures of a few teams coming by. I think this is Gerry Willomitzer...


...and I know this next one is Sonny Lindner.


After it got dark, we went back to the cabin for dinner and to continue the party.



Turns out Thea likes Mint Milanos...


...and Ellie was able to make it up from Delta!


We headed back out to the trail around 10:00pm to see our friend Paige and whoever else was on the trail. It didn't take long after we were out there for her to come by and stop for a brief cheer and words of encouragement before heading on down the trail. After cheering on a few more mushers, it was time to head back to the cabin and go to sleep. Here are Natalie, me, and Kate piled into one of the snow machine sleds for the ride back (Thanks for the picture, Ellie.).


I'm not sure how we'll top that one in 2012!