Mush!

Our excitement this week was having the annual John Beargrease 400 mile sled dog race in our front yard. The race is the longest and most challenging sled dog race in the lower 48 states, with entrants from across the country and Canada. Sadly, we discovered that watching the race from our front deck was a non-event as the dogs raced across Poplar Lake in the middle of the night! Sled dog racing - at least from our house - isn't a spectator sport.

We decided to go down to Trail Center to see the dogs and mushers bed down for their required rest stop before their late (or early morning) departure. It was really interesting, the dogs were very quiet - of course, they'd were pretty tired after mushing all day. We were also surprised to see that they were also much smaller and much thinner than we expected, but some had some bounce left!

We took a couple of pictures, trying not to bother the dogs - who had only two things on their minds - dinner and a rest! I was interested to see that one musher had built a snow fort around his truck to shelter his dogs from the wind. Dinner is obviously not ready yet and the straw bale is destined to become dog beds.

The teams pulled out of Trail Center around midnight, ran up Poplar Lake to Gunflint Lake, across Gunflint and down to Loon and back down to Devil Track Lake. From there it was across to Sawbill, over to Finland and back to Duluth - about 400 miles in around 4 days. We were told that the dogs really enjoyed the good weather - temperatures ranging from a high around 19 above to a low around minus 15 with not a lot of wind and no new ice or snow during the race, just perfect powdery snow on the trails.