Even the pens were frozen.
Volunteers at the Finland Beargrease checkpoint Sunday night had to beg and borrow pencils to do their record keeping.
Monday morning, on about a half hour of sleep, they were still cracking jokes in the cook shack and using a variety of colorful adjectives to describe the temperatures. It got down to at least 19 below, not counting the wind chill–real eyelash-freezing cold.
They should be used to it though. Most are members of the Siberian Husky Club of the Twin Cities and some run sled dogs themselves. Melissa Bloom, Ed Heineman, Chris Wall and Jeff Anclam come up to volunteer every year.
Assistant race judge, Joe Zellner, Grand Marais, was wielding a pancake turner, whipping up eggs and veggie burgers to order on a toasted bun, as the last team was bootied up.
Mushers had the royal treatment at the Finland site–breakfast delivered to their tents, saunas, and massages for them and their dogs by Joanne Olson, who has been part of the race for 23 years, said Linda Nervick, site co-coordinator.
Alice White, a musher from Armuchee, Ga., spent her four-hour and 22-minute layover in Finland tucked in a small canvas tent with a wood stove.
Despite the lack of snow in Georgia, White’s not the only musher there. Here in the northland, mushers use wheeled dog carts in the summer to train the teams to pull sleds in the winter. Down south they use the carts in the winter, and in the summer, she said, all they do is complain about the heat.
White’s was the last team out of the checkpoint at 10:11 a.m. Monday. Four hours and 15 minutes later, she was at the finish line for the mid-distance racers in Tofte with all eight dogs. Coming in last is not bad for a southerner with a young team–even locals had dropped out of the race.
White was running a team of Jedeye Siberian huskies from Manitou Crossing Kennels, owned by Jennifer and Blake Freking of Finland, giving the youngsters some racing experience. She was backed up by three handlers who came down from the Range to help out.
Besides the 28 mid-distance teams that passed through on the way up the shore, there were two marathoners who got off the main trail and came into the checkpoint by mistake. Nervick said the veteran dogs know the trail and were accustomed to checking in there, but this year the route was changed so that marathoners only stopped in Finland on the way back down the shore.
The marathoners were down at the Beaver Bay checkpoint Sunday night, along with a few mid-distance teams. Volunteer fire chief Jenny Mattson, six of her fire crew and the other volunteers were running the checkpoint, watching the road crossings, keeping the two wood stoves in the big tent going and serving up chili and coffee. Mushers were dozing off in the chairs around the stoves, said Mattson, glad to finally be out of the wind.
Volunteers Robert Pout and Jessica Lacey, Beaver Bay, said the great part was the responses of the mushers who were so enthusiastic about the checkpoint. After a few years with not enough snow, the event was finally “back where it should be,” said Pout.
John Beargrease is buried in an Ojibwe cemetery nearby, and each of mushers was taken to the site by his great-grandson for a private ceremony in honor of the race namesake.
The last musher in the Beaver Bay parking lot Monday morning was Linus Meyer of Meyer Grove Trotters, near Melrose. Sunday, he had missed the turn down to Beaver Bay when his glasses fogged up, and he ended up going all the way to Highway 1. He then had to double back to the mandatory checkpoint, going an extra 20 miles.
The next morning, with eight dogs laid up with stiff shoulders and other strains and pains, and only six that could pull, he decided to scratch. Although the race does allow sleds to be pulled by as few as five dogs at the finish line, he decided it was too much to expect of his team. He consulted with the vet onsite and opted out, in favor of a rest in preparation for a shorter race coming up in a few weeks.
Meyer was one of four marathoners to scratch at Beaver Bay. Another five dropped out at Sawbill, one at Pike Lake, and five more at Trail Center–leaving just six of the original 21 racers to complete the race.
The secret to a good race isn’t going full bore the whole distance. Expert mushers say they need to know when to pull back. As the Frekings, who have run marathons and the Iditarod, advised in a radio interview Saturday on A Prairie Home Companion, “Run hard, rest hard.”