The Journey Continues – Finger Lake to Rainy Pass
March 25, 2007

We rested 4 hours in Finger Lake, leaving at 5:45. The Happy River steps were about 10 miles down the trail giving us lots of daylight to traverse them. It was with a more than a little trepidation that I left Finger Lake. Last year I had several crashes getting there and never saw the Happy River Steps. I rolled the sled at the top and was drug to the bottom of the first step lost the team and watched the sled roll off the trail and hit a tree on the second, and had two dogs back out of their collars on the third – I also caught a loose team – twice – when their gangline failed.

This is a tricky stretch of trail and things started as we left the lake, ran behind the lodge and negotiated a twisty downhill run through the trees. I managed with no disasters and was starting to relax about ½ hour later when we sideswiped a large tree with the right handlebar (luckily no body parts were involved). It bent back about 2 inches, but Art Church builds a tough sled and it drove about the same, just a little unbalanced.

I negotiated a couple of steep downhill runs with turns at the bottom and then we were at the steps. You are heading for a sharp drop with a tree on your left and cannot see the trail ahead until you make the turn around the tree. Upright the sight chilled my very bones. A long steep drop with a deep gouge right down the middle with a hairpin turn to the right lay ahead. Thank heaven I had upgraded my brakes after talking to Dallas Seavey last year. Both feet on the brake saying “easy… easy dogs”, then easing off as the leaders hit the turn. I saw the disaster area where I lost the team last year and shot passed it – we made it upright to the semi-level spot just before the last turn to the left and I breathed a sigh of relief. I was going to make it without falling. We made the last turn and I have never driven a dog team over anything like that in my whole life. I was too late getting off the brake and was drug to the inside of the turn. The right runner fell into the grove and the left one stayed on top as I faced a long nearly vertical drop to the river below. Holy Cow! My right elbow rode on the top of the grove like and outrigger and I pressed the brake into the left side as hard as I could to keep from hitting the wheel dogs. Before I could even think, we were at the bottom rolling upright and into the soft snow just off the trail to a smooth stop. That last step was a lot like falling, but I had survived!

I breathed a sigh of relief, said a prayer of thanksgiving, and started down the trail assuming the worst was over. What goes down must go back up and a shortly we had to regain all of that elevation climbing up the other side. Part way up another team caught us, but there was no room to pass. The next twenty some miles of trail were the most challenging I had ever driven. Last year I crashed every few hundred feet on this section. I gave up even counting the crashes. But last year we were cruising at 8 mph with deep snow to cushion the blows. This team was cruising between 10 and 12 mph and the deep snow wasn’t there. This year I didn’t crash nearly as often, but when I did it hurt. I remember sharp twisting runs where I couldn’t see more than 6 dogs at a time. We crashed hard a couple of times bending the drive bow on the right further back and down.

I kept seeing soft areas in the trail that had been trenched and/or punched down a couple of feet below the surrounding area. Much to my horror there were stumps up to three inches across and two to three inches high that were exposed in the bottom of some of these pits. These stumps could destroy a sled if they hit it wrong and I worked hard to either miss them or take the hit on a runner. A couple of these pits were steep enough if it wasn’t for the dogs pulling the sled forward I would have buried the nose in the soft snow at the bottom.

Then I came around a corner and the sled flew off the trail into a tree throwing me about 4 feet further down a very steep bank into branches and soft snow (thank Heaven). I couldn’t stand up and touch the ground, it was that steep. I climbed up on the evergreen branches, pulling myself from tree to tree back to the trail. The sled was about 1 foot off the trail on its side resting against a small tree. With some mighty pulls and a little help from the English language I got it back on the trail. Then I went up to line out the dogs and saw where a small spring flowed from the side of the hill and across the trail. That was all ice now and if I had hit that at speed I would have been thrown into large trees and hurt. Later I learned this was where Doug Swingley and Dee Dee Jonrowe broke the bones that made them scratch. The teams behind me waited while I got everything lined out and we were off again.

There were several lesser crashes before we got to Rainy Pass – always around blind corners and I was hollering to warn the teams behind that I was there – sometimes they couldn’t stop either, but we avoided bad tangles somehow. I finally pulled into Puntilla Lake (Rainy Pass Lodge) at 10:30 that night after 5 hours of the hardest work I’d ever done on a sled. My clothes were soaked in sweat and as soon as I got the dogs taken care of I walked into the wind to the cabin Iditarod had reserved for mushers to sleep in planning to leave the next morning about 7 am.

The only place I’ve seen people sleep in less comfortable positions was in the military. The cabin was so crowded mushers did everything but hang from the rafters. There was no straight 6 foot long space anywhere. I hung my gear the best I could and curled up on the floor near Karen Ramstead’s feet (she was wrapped tightly in a chair). About 5 am Karen and some other veterans got up to leave and I stretched out. When I got up and hour later the clothes that I had hung to dry were either still wet or frozen. I had been so tired I hung them too far from the wood stove. I dressed, fed my dogs and returned to a nearly empty cabin to finish drying and get some more sleep. There was lots of discussion among the remaining mushers about the wind over the pass and the wisdom of leaving vs. taking a 24 and hoping the storm would pass.

About noon I was ready to go when word came that three mushers who left after Karen’s group came back saying the Pass was impassible. Andy Angstman from Bethel, who grew up running in the wind, lost the trail and had some dogs blown off their feet. Supposedly there were some dogs that got loose from previous teams that were still running loose in the pass. The word in the checkpoint was the winds were blowing 80 to 90 mph hour in the pass and Iditarod recommended that we not go over at this time. I decided to 24 in Rainy Pass and leave near dawn the next morning when the winds were supposed to die down. That meant a 30 hour stay in Rainy Pass and quickly moved me to the very back of the pack. It also meant I couldn’t use my 24 to rest, recover, or fix anything later.
Keep ‘em Northbound


Eric
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