Soldier Mountain Quest, Conclusion

On the second day of the race, I was up early to see if the truck would start. Some clouds had moved in and brought a little snow overnight, keeping the temperature warmer, so I had no trouble getting the truck started. The race start was earlier than the day before, so I got quite a bit colder out on the trail even though I dressed warmer on the second day.


The trail had been freshly groomed and had set up nice and hard, so the trail conditions were fantastic. I left the chute first, but the second place team, Kate St Onge, caught me while we were still going uphill. My team got all excited to chase and stayed on her tail over the top and all the way down through the switchbacks.


I had done my best to tie my drag track on more securely, but trying desperately to control the team on the downhill caused the broken side to come loose again. Nevertheless, we made it safely to the river bottom and passed back and forth a couple times with the other team until I hooked down in order to try to tie the drag track back in place. I had another motive for stopping, and that was that I did not want our two teams to be at the tiny little turnaround loop at the same time.


Kate got about five minutes ahead of me, and there was nobody at all close behind us, so I had the turnaround all to myself. It was a good thing because I had all sorts of trouble this time. The dogs just did not understand what they were supposed to do there. At first they tried to visit the trail help. The trail help got them headed the right way, but they were all tangled up. Then the trail help thought they should untangle them and could not seem to hear me hollering at them to come back to the sled and stand on my snowhook. It was a tangle that only a musher can undo. These things always seem to take forever, but it was probably less than five minutes, and we were blasting back down the trail.


Once again the head-on passes went very well, and the rest of the race went smoothly. I did not see Kate again, but I finished only ten minutes behind her. This left me well ahead in the overall time, so I was the winner of the first Soldier Mountain Quest.


They gave me this beautiful hand painted gourd as a prize.