You may be wondering, of course you may be not, how I can be so confident that I was not at home that first weekend in February 2014 when I was not actually taking part in the Yukon Quest. Well, I may not have been on the runners that weekend but I was in Fairbanks standing in the Yukon Quest start chute, and with just a little bit of envy, watching the other teams heading out down the trail; I had the honour of having been invited to be one of the 2014 Yukon Quest race officials. I thought it would be pretty easy to write about the year I was a Quest race judge; I learnt a ton, saw a lot, made new friends (and a few enemies ;) ) and all in all had a pretty good time. Then I got to thinking that maybe some of the things you see as an official should really remain within the race (at least until one writes a book) and so I will only touch briefly on my experiences – besides I need to save a bit of energy for tomorrow and the story of our 2015 Yukon Quest J.
So why a gamekeeper and not a poacher you may ask you may ask (unless of course you have no idea what that phrase means in which case again you may not); why wasn’t I taking part as a ‘competitor’ that year. To answer that it I probably necessary to go back to the aftermath of the 2013 Quest.
As I mentioned previously in yesterday’s tale, Louise had made an epic cross-Canada journey of her own, with 14 dogs and a cat in tow, in order to help handle for me on the Quest. Fortunately, and despite a journey that landed her in the Yukon during a particularly cold Christmas, she fell in love with the territory and so after the race we decided we would stay around Whitehorse for the foreseeable future. We didn’t necessarily think this decision through very well as the race had drained the last of our funds, we were broke, knew hardly anybody, had no jobs, no way to access my pension funds in the UK and we were renting a small, dry, off-grid cabin about 40 minutes north of Whitehorse. To add a twist into the mix, we also had a house back in New Brunswick which we had pretty much just abandoned and had no money to be able to fly back to the east coast to put our very many possessions into storage and put the house on the market. Fortunately Sebastian, who we were renting the cabin off, helped us out by getting us to run short sled dog trips for tourists; as well as pay and tips this had the added bonus that the majority of the clients were Asian, in Yukon for the Northern Lights (don’t ask), and so spoke very little English which was just about perfect for me and as I not the greatest conversationalist, particularly with strangers.
Slowly things seemed to be starting to turn round for us: Louise got a job at an organic farm and I was also offered some hours to help bring in money. Then I managed to get a job working in a fish processing plant that was part of a fish farm and was eventually ‘promoted’ to actually work in the farm itself (which was decidedly better than gutting and filleting fish all day. Life was not all rosy however, word reached us that the house in New Brunswick had been broken in to, repeatedly, and had been trashed. Still struggling for money, and still unable to access funds in my UK bank account, we scraped together enough money for one of us to fly back and Louise agreed that she would go as I was bringing in more money from the fish plant job. Unfortunately we had to do this on a very limited budget which involved Louise flying to Montreal, using a coach service to get to New Brunswick and then having less than a week to get as many of our possessions into storage as possible whilst cleaning the house up enough that we might be able to sell it. The story is long, sad and still pains me now to think about it 8 years later but we ended up losing a significant proportion of our possessions which included christening gifts, 21st birthday presents and sentimental gifts from our families, mementos that I had been given when leaving squadrons and units in the Navy and were irreplaceable and hundreds and hundreds of books as well as thousands of dollars of kennel panels. To add insult to injury the person buying the property twisted and connived at every opportunity and we ended up making a loss on the sale of the property that was in excess of $100,000. When I did eventually get back to New Brunswick to get what was left of our possessions out of storage and pick up more items from the property, the person who had scored such a great deal in buying the property off us, refused to allow me back onto the property to pick up whatever else had been left behind.
Not everything however was doom and gloom, as winter broke into spring and the Yukon started to reveal its full beauty, I was able to get a project managers’ position with Yukon College and whilst I had enjoyed the manual labour and outdoors work at the fish farm, better money and a nice warm office also had its appeals.
For a variety of reasons we decided to move closer to Whitehorse whilst we started looking for our own place to purchase (buying a property is really not an easy or a cheap task in Whitehorse for ‘normal’ people but even more difficult to find a suitable property when there are 30+ dogs to consider). So as spring turned to summer we moved into another dry cabin, although this time with electricity and access to a shower block and now only about 15 minutes out of the city, saving us a fortune on our daily commutes.
At around the same time I decided I wanted to give something back to the Yukon Quest as the Quest itself had had such an impact on our lives. Knowing that the financial situation around the race was not the best I decided to join the Yukon Board of Directors in April of 2013 to see if I could do anything to help out.
As summer turned to fall money was still tight and we were still having significant issues with the sale of the property in New Brunswick, something that was really playing on my sleep (or lack thereof). The property we were living on also didn’t have the greatest network of trails associated with it and some pretty asinine restrictions were placed on us for when we could hook up dogs and so considering all this and our precarious financial condition, we decided to giving racing a miss that winter. Aside from the winter I had spent in the Gulf after 9/11, we had pretty much been training and racing every winter from 1998 through until 2013 and so taking a winter off from racing really didn’t seem like a bad thing. I did however want to remain involved with the Quest as much as possible and so, in no small part due to my association with the Board of Directors, the Quest Race Marshal, Doug Grilliot, asked if I wanted to be part of his judging team for the 2014 race – I snapped his hand off.
And so on the first Saturday in February a group of us gathered in downtown Fairbanks, donned our blue parkas (the official dress of the Quest judges) and set out to ensure, as best as possible, a fair and enjoyable race where dog care would be our number one concern and getting as many teams to the finish line as safely as possible our number two concern. Doug had assembled quite a team, all either Quest or Iditarod veterans, I was by far the least experienced: as well as Doug and myself there was Russ Bybee, Scott Smith, Bob McAlpine, Greg Parvin (who also happened to be the CB300 Race Marshall) and last but certainly not least Zack Steer.
For the start of the race it was ‘agreed’ that I would travel with Doug at the front of the pack – I am not sure if this was because he liked my company (doubtful) or if he wanted to keep a close eye on the rookie judge. Regardless of the reason it was a real treat to be up close with the really competitive teams at the front of the pack, seeing how they cared for their dogs, the amazing condition these athletes were in coming into and out of checkpoints (I am of course talking about the dogs, the mushers were not always looking their best J ). Trying to keep up with the front of the pack was also interesting in that I got a very close look at the logistics that is required to keep the race moving and how hard everyone works behind the scenes so that the mushers and dogs have as seamless a race as possible; I hope I got a much better appreciation of what it takes to stage a major international sled dog race. By the time we got to Circle, about 220 miles into the race, Brent, Allen and Hugh were on a charge and it was proving difficult for the race logistics to keep pace with them. The weather had closed in and so the race manager, Alex Olsen, was having some challenges trying to fly a vet and official into the dog drop at Slaven’s Cabin as well as trying to get Doug, myself, the vets and the PR team flown into Eagle ahead of the first racers; Brent was moving so fast that things were getting tight.
Fortunately for all concerned the cloud based lifted enough for us to take off from Circle in the smallest aircraft imaginable and we were able to get to the checkpoint in Eagle just ahead of Brent. Brent’s team looked amazing when he arrived and he was his usual upbeat self. When we asked if the trail was ok he gave a wry smile and said his feet got a bit wet but nothing serious. As became evident later, and as the trackers started to reveal, one person’s wet feet was another man’s chest deep overflow. Just after the front runners had passed through the area, a section of the Yukon between Slaven’s and Eagle, just by Kandick’s Cabin, had overflowed very badly. Matt Hall, Dave Dalton and John Schandelmeier running in 4th to 6th had assumed the trail was marked badly and not wanted to cross what looked like open water had got right off the race trail and started to follow the river bank on the opposite side of the river to where the actual trail was. Curt Perano and Ken Anderson, running behind those three, decided to cross the open water, with Curt in particularly reporting later that the water had been up to his chest. Fortunately he knew there was a safety cabin nearby and was able to get into Kandick’s Cabin, got a fire going and was able to dry his clothes. Whilst watching all this unfold on the tracker the front of the race continued apace and so soon Doug and I were back inside a miniature aircraft and heading for Dawson, the halfway point of the race and the location of the teams’ 36 hour layover.
Whether Doug had concluded that I was harmless, or he had had enough of my company (I suspect the latter), it was decided that I would stay in Dawson and see the rest of the teams arrive and then stick with the back of the pack as the race moved slowly, but inevitably, towards the finish line. Whilst I missed all the ‘fun’ of Brent falling off his sled and having to be recovered to hospital when in a seemingly unassailable lead, I did get to help coordinate a rescue off the river and hear Hank DeBruin mutter the memorable words when reflecting of his run on the Yukon: “I stared into the eyes of the devil and I didn’t like what I saw!”
After all the trials the team had undergone getting to Dawson, the second half of the race was somewhat uneventful, at least as far as I care to report here. Slowly but surely we progressed from checkpoint to checkpoint, helping and advising where required, pushing and prodding where necessary. It was interesting to watch sleep deprived mushers trying to get ready to leave a checkpoint, or in some cases trying not to get ready to leave checkpoints (I now have some sympathy for those checkpoint managers who have come close to forcibly evicting me on occasion) and reflecting on how I must look when sleep deprived yet still trying to race. However make our way we did and 13 days, 11 hours and one minute after starting out in Fairbanks on the first Saturday in February Jerry Joinson pulled up under the finish banner at Takhini Hot Springs (the Yukon River coming into Whitehorse was deemed too dangerous to run on), to receive the red lantern and conclude the 2014 Yukon Quest and in so doing bringing to a close what was for me a very tiring but enjoyable, rewarding and informative first race as an official. Perhaps a post racing career path beckons! Tomorrow back to the interesting stuff – my stupidity and how I apparently did everything I could not to finish the 2015 Yukon Quest.
So why a gamekeeper and not a poacher you may ask you may ask (unless of course you have no idea what that phrase means in which case again you may not); why wasn’t I taking part as a ‘competitor’ that year. To answer that it I probably necessary to go back to the aftermath of the 2013 Quest.
As I mentioned previously in yesterday’s tale, Louise had made an epic cross-Canada journey of her own, with 14 dogs and a cat in tow, in order to help handle for me on the Quest. Fortunately, and despite a journey that landed her in the Yukon during a particularly cold Christmas, she fell in love with the territory and so after the race we decided we would stay around Whitehorse for the foreseeable future. We didn’t necessarily think this decision through very well as the race had drained the last of our funds, we were broke, knew hardly anybody, had no jobs, no way to access my pension funds in the UK and we were renting a small, dry, off-grid cabin about 40 minutes north of Whitehorse. To add a twist into the mix, we also had a house back in New Brunswick which we had pretty much just abandoned and had no money to be able to fly back to the east coast to put our very many possessions into storage and put the house on the market. Fortunately Sebastian, who we were renting the cabin off, helped us out by getting us to run short sled dog trips for tourists; as well as pay and tips this had the added bonus that the majority of the clients were Asian, in Yukon for the Northern Lights (don’t ask), and so spoke very little English which was just about perfect for me and as I not the greatest conversationalist, particularly with strangers.
Slowly things seemed to be starting to turn round for us: Louise got a job at an organic farm and I was also offered some hours to help bring in money. Then I managed to get a job working in a fish processing plant that was part of a fish farm and was eventually ‘promoted’ to actually work in the farm itself (which was decidedly better than gutting and filleting fish all day. Life was not all rosy however, word reached us that the house in New Brunswick had been broken in to, repeatedly, and had been trashed. Still struggling for money, and still unable to access funds in my UK bank account, we scraped together enough money for one of us to fly back and Louise agreed that she would go as I was bringing in more money from the fish plant job. Unfortunately we had to do this on a very limited budget which involved Louise flying to Montreal, using a coach service to get to New Brunswick and then having less than a week to get as many of our possessions into storage as possible whilst cleaning the house up enough that we might be able to sell it. The story is long, sad and still pains me now to think about it 8 years later but we ended up losing a significant proportion of our possessions which included christening gifts, 21st birthday presents and sentimental gifts from our families, mementos that I had been given when leaving squadrons and units in the Navy and were irreplaceable and hundreds and hundreds of books as well as thousands of dollars of kennel panels. To add insult to injury the person buying the property twisted and connived at every opportunity and we ended up making a loss on the sale of the property that was in excess of $100,000. When I did eventually get back to New Brunswick to get what was left of our possessions out of storage and pick up more items from the property, the person who had scored such a great deal in buying the property off us, refused to allow me back onto the property to pick up whatever else had been left behind.
Not everything however was doom and gloom, as winter broke into spring and the Yukon started to reveal its full beauty, I was able to get a project managers’ position with Yukon College and whilst I had enjoyed the manual labour and outdoors work at the fish farm, better money and a nice warm office also had its appeals.
For a variety of reasons we decided to move closer to Whitehorse whilst we started looking for our own place to purchase (buying a property is really not an easy or a cheap task in Whitehorse for ‘normal’ people but even more difficult to find a suitable property when there are 30+ dogs to consider). So as spring turned to summer we moved into another dry cabin, although this time with electricity and access to a shower block and now only about 15 minutes out of the city, saving us a fortune on our daily commutes.
At around the same time I decided I wanted to give something back to the Yukon Quest as the Quest itself had had such an impact on our lives. Knowing that the financial situation around the race was not the best I decided to join the Yukon Board of Directors in April of 2013 to see if I could do anything to help out.
As summer turned to fall money was still tight and we were still having significant issues with the sale of the property in New Brunswick, something that was really playing on my sleep (or lack thereof). The property we were living on also didn’t have the greatest network of trails associated with it and some pretty asinine restrictions were placed on us for when we could hook up dogs and so considering all this and our precarious financial condition, we decided to giving racing a miss that winter. Aside from the winter I had spent in the Gulf after 9/11, we had pretty much been training and racing every winter from 1998 through until 2013 and so taking a winter off from racing really didn’t seem like a bad thing. I did however want to remain involved with the Quest as much as possible and so, in no small part due to my association with the Board of Directors, the Quest Race Marshal, Doug Grilliot, asked if I wanted to be part of his judging team for the 2014 race – I snapped his hand off.
And so on the first Saturday in February a group of us gathered in downtown Fairbanks, donned our blue parkas (the official dress of the Quest judges) and set out to ensure, as best as possible, a fair and enjoyable race where dog care would be our number one concern and getting as many teams to the finish line as safely as possible our number two concern. Doug had assembled quite a team, all either Quest or Iditarod veterans, I was by far the least experienced: as well as Doug and myself there was Russ Bybee, Scott Smith, Bob McAlpine, Greg Parvin (who also happened to be the CB300 Race Marshall) and last but certainly not least Zack Steer.
For the start of the race it was ‘agreed’ that I would travel with Doug at the front of the pack – I am not sure if this was because he liked my company (doubtful) or if he wanted to keep a close eye on the rookie judge. Regardless of the reason it was a real treat to be up close with the really competitive teams at the front of the pack, seeing how they cared for their dogs, the amazing condition these athletes were in coming into and out of checkpoints (I am of course talking about the dogs, the mushers were not always looking their best J ). Trying to keep up with the front of the pack was also interesting in that I got a very close look at the logistics that is required to keep the race moving and how hard everyone works behind the scenes so that the mushers and dogs have as seamless a race as possible; I hope I got a much better appreciation of what it takes to stage a major international sled dog race. By the time we got to Circle, about 220 miles into the race, Brent, Allen and Hugh were on a charge and it was proving difficult for the race logistics to keep pace with them. The weather had closed in and so the race manager, Alex Olsen, was having some challenges trying to fly a vet and official into the dog drop at Slaven’s Cabin as well as trying to get Doug, myself, the vets and the PR team flown into Eagle ahead of the first racers; Brent was moving so fast that things were getting tight.
Fortunately for all concerned the cloud based lifted enough for us to take off from Circle in the smallest aircraft imaginable and we were able to get to the checkpoint in Eagle just ahead of Brent. Brent’s team looked amazing when he arrived and he was his usual upbeat self. When we asked if the trail was ok he gave a wry smile and said his feet got a bit wet but nothing serious. As became evident later, and as the trackers started to reveal, one person’s wet feet was another man’s chest deep overflow. Just after the front runners had passed through the area, a section of the Yukon between Slaven’s and Eagle, just by Kandick’s Cabin, had overflowed very badly. Matt Hall, Dave Dalton and John Schandelmeier running in 4th to 6th had assumed the trail was marked badly and not wanted to cross what looked like open water had got right off the race trail and started to follow the river bank on the opposite side of the river to where the actual trail was. Curt Perano and Ken Anderson, running behind those three, decided to cross the open water, with Curt in particularly reporting later that the water had been up to his chest. Fortunately he knew there was a safety cabin nearby and was able to get into Kandick’s Cabin, got a fire going and was able to dry his clothes. Whilst watching all this unfold on the tracker the front of the race continued apace and so soon Doug and I were back inside a miniature aircraft and heading for Dawson, the halfway point of the race and the location of the teams’ 36 hour layover.
Whether Doug had concluded that I was harmless, or he had had enough of my company (I suspect the latter), it was decided that I would stay in Dawson and see the rest of the teams arrive and then stick with the back of the pack as the race moved slowly, but inevitably, towards the finish line. Whilst I missed all the ‘fun’ of Brent falling off his sled and having to be recovered to hospital when in a seemingly unassailable lead, I did get to help coordinate a rescue off the river and hear Hank DeBruin mutter the memorable words when reflecting of his run on the Yukon: “I stared into the eyes of the devil and I didn’t like what I saw!”
After all the trials the team had undergone getting to Dawson, the second half of the race was somewhat uneventful, at least as far as I care to report here. Slowly but surely we progressed from checkpoint to checkpoint, helping and advising where required, pushing and prodding where necessary. It was interesting to watch sleep deprived mushers trying to get ready to leave a checkpoint, or in some cases trying not to get ready to leave checkpoints (I now have some sympathy for those checkpoint managers who have come close to forcibly evicting me on occasion) and reflecting on how I must look when sleep deprived yet still trying to race. However make our way we did and 13 days, 11 hours and one minute after starting out in Fairbanks on the first Saturday in February Jerry Joinson pulled up under the finish banner at Takhini Hot Springs (the Yukon River coming into Whitehorse was deemed too dangerous to run on), to receive the red lantern and conclude the 2014 Yukon Quest and in so doing bringing to a close what was for me a very tiring but enjoyable, rewarding and informative first race as an official. Perhaps a post racing career path beckons! Tomorrow back to the interesting stuff – my stupidity and how I apparently did everything I could not to finish the 2015 Yukon Quest.
