Day 3

Bunkbeds, hmm…top was better than bottom, but what with heat rising n all, it was like a sauna up there! I forgot to mention that we had no electricity in the cabin, candlelit dinner was fun (mini gas cooker) but headtorches were a must for visits to the toilet "hut"…best recommended for those with no sense of smell, fortunately the seat was polystyrene so well insulated.
Anyway, I was the 7am alarm call since i’d only nabbed a coupe of hours sleep again. Team A got the breakfast ready while Team B fed the dogs again. Quicker than last night since the huge water pot was warm enough to mix the meal with.
A few of us took more photos before tucking into porridge, bread and cheese (or ham). Alex was having a hard time with Becky as she wasn’t eating, and we need around 3500 calories a day to keep going in current temperatures. Since her dad is probably reading this, i’ll say "don’t worry, she’s fine now"…but keeping the threat of contacting him up my sleeve just in case
So, we took forever to pack uptidy up then harness up the dogs. I put my wheel dogs on first by mistake, so they wandered over to argue with some neighbouring ones while i clipped on my leaders. With over 50 dogs on the trip, it takes us a good hour to get them ready, and the noise is deafening!
We had our first casualties as we headed out of the forest on a handbrake turn.. I felt smug enough to get round without tipping the sled over…karma, oops!
There had been so much snow lately that the trail was completely covered. Milos was pretty much using his dogs and sled as a snowplough, tough on all of them since they had to do it regularly over 6ish hours.
I had an impressive wipeout not long into the trip, but needed 2 people to get me out of the snow i’d landed in…any time i stuck out a limb to use as leverage, it just sank. I think i had to roll my way out in the end, the used helping hands to get me and my deep-wedged sled upright. I was a little thrown by this, since the falling on day 2 was much easier to recover from. I also managed a couple of upright falls where i couldn’t tip the sled over so had to hold on until my resistance acted as a break.
The earlier one had shaken my confidence though, so i spent the whole day gripping so tightly it was hard to de-grip my fingers by the end. Lots of lovely tension to look forwar
to tomorrow if the reiki doesn’t sort it out first!.
We made a stop for a toilet break after a couple of hours, it should only have taken one! Due to how late we were running, the decision was taken to skip our lunch break, but only found this out around 6pm.
Verbal fisticuffs ensued between me and Jennifer (not Jenny) after my dogs sniffed her bum a time too many. I was getting cramp in my left leg from standing on it while i braked with my right, braking was almost constant since jennifer’s dogs were on a go-slow day with no overtaking lane. So we swore at each other a bit but eventually made up after both of us apologised! I spent a lot of the day in tears as a result of lack of sleep/food/hormones, rather than the awestruck ones i had yesterday. We are, according to Alex, his most emotional group…i wasn’t the only one wailing by the end of it!
As we yomped onwards, it was getting pretty dark, so we had to keep pushing on despite our fatigue. Nearer the end, Amanda’s sled tipped but instead of getting up, she climbed on it and wouldn’t move. Eventually she was on her feet, but we all had a little assistance from Alex to get past the hazard. The hazard turned out to be the river underneath us. Although it was frozen, the snow on top pushed the ice down to give some water lying on top of it, but we didn’t know that when trying to push off in a watery hole!
Finally, after going through forests resembling a theme park ride with a Splash Mountain log flume at the end, we reached our pit-stop for the night, a local Sami home with electricity and running water!
We seemed to take forever to get the dogs chained up in the dark, with kneehight drifts, but it was all done eventually. We love tonight’s accommodation – one big room upstairs with mattresses on the floor, a sauna we were mostly too knackered to bother with and a home cooked meal waiting for us along with plenty of tea and coffee. The carnivores had Rudolph served up to them, tasted like beef apparently. Becky ate most of ut, meaning Alex was happy enough for her to stay with the group, and the car on standby, to take the catering help back to mushers lodge, went without an additional passenger.
Right, i’m so exhausted i must go to sleep now, apologies for any typos as i’m dozing off mid-type.
Tomorrow we go back to last night’s hut but a slightky different route. Milos is thinking of getting a snowmobile to plough a trail for us this time.

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