YQ: Dawson City Handler Check-in

As Allen and the Black Team continue towards Dawson, we (the handler crew) have arrived.

After we said farewell to the team in Circle they travelled 60 miles to Slaven’s Roadhouse where Allen rested the team around five hours. Slaven’s always has exceptional hospitality for the mushers and Allen was looking forward to having a delicious meal and drying his gear over the wood stove. As Slaven’s is not an official checkpoint we don’t send drop bags there so the mushers bring everything with them from Circle.

The team mushed another 60 miles along the river to the Trout Creek hospitality stop where he gave the team over a couple of hours rest. He likely wouldn’t have had any rest there himself as the arrival and departure chores take the same amount of time where ever they stay and anything left over after that is rest time for Allen. A two hour stop would not leave him any time to rest.

At 11:10am the team pulled into Eagle in first position. There is still a long way to go in this race so don’t even look for any chickens to count for a long while yet. Check out the Yukon Quest Facebook page for some great images of the team arriving.

We have noticed from this picture that he has swapped out his leaders. Spark and Dutch are in lead here and he has moved Commando and Kodiak back to swing. This is likely to give Kodi and Commando a break as they had been leading the whole way.

There is a mandatory four hour stop for all teams in Eagle but Allen was always planning to give the team more than that. They rested 5.5 hours before he and 14 team mates left for the long climb up American Summit.

The climb up the summit is around 25 miles on the Taylor Highway – in the summer it is a road but in the winter it is not plowed. There’s is about four miles that is above the tree line so it is often really windy up there. The next 20 miles is on the road that goes up and down as they travel through the hills.

The trail then crosses 40 Mile River over a bridge and the then goes pretty sharply down onto the river. The 40 Mile River has pretty steep banks on either side and it’s pretty cold because the sun never gets down into the river due to the geography. It’s not windy down there but the temperature never rises much.

There is one hospitality stop at Clinton Creek, the owners of the cabin let the mushers in their cabin and cook for them. Last year Allen said he slept at the foot of their bed.

After 50 miles of travelling on 40 Mile River the trail T-bones into the Yukon and they turn upriver. The first 20 miles are not a super-highway, although they have been travelled for 100 years. Whereas, the last 30 miles into Dawson is a common trapline trail. The teams will start seeing the lights of Dawson about 3-4 miles out so when you approach town in the dark it is more exciting for the dogs.

The forecast overnight is cold, cold, bitter cold! It’s more than -40F here in Dawson. On the river? Goodness knows but it won’t be comfortable for the humans.

As for us, we left the kennel in darkness and were welcomed into Canada before the sun rose. Once it did it was gorgeous! We passed lynx, elk, moose and just missed a ptarmigan with a death wish. There was little traffic on the road, it’s a long, lonely road.

We stopped at Braeburn Lodge for breakfast, it’s quite a different place when the mushers, handler crews, media and race fans crowd in here in a few days so we took some time to meet with Steve, the owner, and enjoy the hospitality.

This year the campsite for the team is not over the river where it has always been. The river did not freeze well this year so no official ice bridge could be put in to get all the trucks and teams over there. Instead we are in the Bonanza RV camp which is a couple of miles south of town. We stopped there on the way in and started our set up.

Originally we thought we would just go have a look, then we thought “hey, well we may as well get everything out of the truck”. Then, “hey well we could start shovelling the snow, and while we are at it we could start setting up camp”.

Before we knew it we were half done but pretty cold and starving so we checked into our hotel, had a meal and retrieved the drop sacks we sent out a couple weeks ago. After dinner we returned to do more work and it is in pretty good shape. Tomorrow in the daylight we will put the finishing touches on as we await our precious ones.

Dawson is already alive with Quest Fever. In saying that I think Dawson is always alive with events, it is a vibrant town. We look forward to spending a few days here.

For now we are going to try to get some sleep interspersed with checking the tracker. Once they hit town we are all hands on deck so we’d like to be well rested so we can support them the best we possibly can.