2025 Yukon Quest Alaska 550

The Yukon Quest Alaska 550.. wow! What a race.. what a trail.. what absolutely incredible dogs these are! We spent 5 and a half days traveling over 500 miles of the roughest, rawest country Alaska has to offer.. and it was absolutely epic!

We left downtown Fairbanks on Feb 01, where we almost immediately busted a bolt holding the drag mat (what the musher uses to moderate the speed of the dogs and keep their speed steady) bracket to the sled. I still had one bolt holding the drag mat to the sled, but since the team had so much speed and power, I didn’t want to risk catching the drag mat on ice or other trail feature and then end up busting the other bolt and losing the whole drag mat. I decided to hinge the drag mat into its upright position, where it would not be at risk of further damage, and I would fix it at my first camp stop. This left me to use the claw brake as the only method for controlling my speed. It was an uncomfortable position to be in trying to control a 14-dog train that was fresh and full of spit and vinegar since we had just started the race. But we made it to the first checkpoint (Two Rivers), grabbed a bale of straw, and departed down the trail to our first camp spot. At about mile 55, a couple miles from where I was looking to camp, more misfortune struck as a bolt for my claw brake sheared as well. Now I had no drag mat and no claw brake.. basically I didn’t have a way to stop the team! Not at all what you want.. so I decided to pull over right away and camp at the nearest spot. This put us a couple miles short of my desired camp spot, but overall still alright because we were still set up to do the run to the second checkpoint (Mile 101) in two roughly equal runs. We had a nice first camp, and I was able to replace the bolts on both my drag mat and claw brake and we were ready to carry on!

Our second run of the race included the exciting Angel Creek “pinball” section, where we quite literally pinballed off of a couple of trees and obstacles going through, and then the famous Rosebud summit. Before we got to Rosebud, though, we encountered an unexpected obstacle.. a recently-graded road that was sheer ice! When we came onto the road, the dogs felt the ice and had good traction and took off. I had both feet on the claw brake with my entire weight and there was nothing I could do to stop the team! And the team decided to run down the middle of the road, meaning that I couldn’t get to the berm on the side to try to get a snow hook to catch. Every command I gave the dogs (“Gee-Over” or “Whoahhhhh”) only made the dogs pull harder.. we were in a pickle! And then came the trail markers indicating a hard 90-degree lefthand turn off of the road, around a snow berm, and back onto a trail. As we approached, I made the “Haw” call for a lefthand turn.. but once again this just made the dogs run faster! And the road was graded straight ahead of the dogs into a driveway.. we blew by the corner we needed to turn at and went down the driveway.. not ideal at all! I finally got the team stopped.. still on glare ice.. and was able to do a 180-degree turn with the dogs to be facing back towards where we needed to make a turn onto the trail, now a righthand “Gee” turn. The turn was just about 20 yards in front of my leaders.. I kept heavy pressure on the claw brake and slowly allowed the dogs to move ahead towards the corner and as we approached the corner I gave them the “Gee” command and they burst forward with power and energy! Only the dogs didn’t take the turn.. they insisted on running down the road, right back in the direction we had just came. We were now running in the complete wrong direction back down the middle of the road.. an even worse situation to be in! At the end of the road was another driveway, which the dogs ran right into before calming enough to be stopped. I tied the dogs off and did another 180-degree turn to face them back in the right direction down the trail. Other mushers were coming up behind me at this point and were also having difficulty turning and stopping their teams and convincing them to make the turn off of the glare-ice road. Eventually we were able to make it to the corner and this time the dogs took the turn and we were back on the trail.. after about an hour of high-stress shenanigans! From there, we cruised up Rosebud which was a big climb but fun to work with the dogs to get to the top. On the way down, the trail was a bit windblown and steep at times, meaning the brake was catching on rocks and gravel at times on our descent. We finally made it through though and into the Mile 101 checkpoint. After taking a 6 hour rest, I decided to drop Mario from my team as he was showing some residual soreness in his shoulder.

Our next challenge was Eagle Summit, a notorious mountain well-known for whiteout blizzard conditions that can make the trail difficult to find and travel. For us, the weather was favorable, and we had a nice easy climb up and then a harrowing but overall uneventful drop down the other side. We coasted down the mining roads and onto Crooked Creek. Last year (2024), Crooked Creek was full of overflow, but this year there was none present, which I was very happy about. We made it into Central, grabbed a bale of straw and other dog supplies, and a bacon cheeseburger TO-GO! from the Corner Bar there and headed out towards the next major feature of the race - Birch Creek. About 20 miles out of Central, right about where the trail meets Birch Creek, we camped out with our friend Lauro and his team. There we rested for about 6 hours and then took off at about 11pm to tackle the 55 miles of Birch Creek into the next checkpoint, Circle.

Birch Creek has a reputation for being a long, mind-numbing, and extremely cold run for the race. Lucky for us, temperatures were reasonable this year - only maybe 20 degrees below 0! Not bad.. but the run was still extremely mind-numbing. Birch Creek is an extremely meandering river, flowing back and forth across the landscape in a snaking-fashion. The trail tracks about 55 miles to cover a distance that is only about 30 miles as-the-crow-flies and seems to take forever. Our run also started at 11pm and carried into the early morning hours, when sleep deprivation really started to catch up to me. I tied myself off to the sled so that I could nod off for naps of a couple of minutes at a time. Finally, we came up to Circle. We took another 6-hr rest in Circle and loaded the sled for the long 160-mile trek ahead of us along the Yukon River. I made the decision to drop Yoshi and Oasis in Circle as they were showing signs of fatigue and I didn’t want to have to carry them in my sled for such a long stretch of the race if they lost interest in running.

The Yukon River was a feature of this year’s race that I was really looking forward to. I had never spent time on the River before and was excited to travel a section of the traditional Quest trail that I had not been on before. Our first run along the river took us from Circle to Slaven’s Cabin, a cabin managed by the National Park Service and a staple stop for mushers on the 1000-mile Quest race. This was about a 60-mile run. Along the way, we crossed a new challenge that I hadn’t faced before - jumble ice. Jumble ice forms when the River is icing over in the fall. Ice forms over the river and then the river water level drops, leaving a pocket of air underneath the ice and above the liquid water below. The water is not supporting the ice from below and so for wide expanses of the river, the weight of the ice is too much and it breaks off and falls into the water below as ice chunks ranging in size up to the size of a small car! These icebergs float down the river until they encounter an area where the ice didn’t calve. The icebergs dam up there and then freeze in place. However, the icebergs are no longer in a nice smooth conformation but rather in a jagged array. From Circle to Slaven’s Cabin, we had to cross sections of jumble ice numerous times. The trailbreakers for the race had spent many hours picking a trail through the jagged ice chunks, even using chainsaws and sledgehammers to break open trail in some sections. This was a challenging section of the trail to drive the sled through because there were ice chunks on both sides of the narrow trail and the ice was completely unforgiving if I slightly misjudged how to brake and drive around the curvy trail. But mile by mile, we made it through. And then we came around a big bend in the river into a narrow canyon and were faced with the next challenge of the race - a strong headwind! The wind in this section probably averaged about 50 mph with gusts up to 70 mph or more. Snow had fallen on the river a couple days prior, and the wind was blowing it all over the place. The trail was blown over and nearly impossible to find. There was essentially no evidence of sled tracks from the couple of teams ahead of us in the race. Instead we were trying to find and follow the skeg scratches in the river ice from the trailbreakers’ snowmachines. It was slow going, but I had Peso in single lead and he was finding the trail and was receptive to me calling him side-to-side across the ice and so we were moving upriver. Then we got into the real heavy wind! In this section of the trail, the river channel was about 200 yards wide from bank-to-bank and the trail traveled right about down the middle. But down the middle of the channel was also where the stiffest head wind was and the dogs instead wanted to run over on the far lefthand bank of the river, where the wind was slightly less strong. I could still see the trail markers over to my right in the middle of the channel and we were moving in the right direction, so we carried on. Then we had to make a hard turn to cross the river and cross through jumble ice. The wind was confusing the dogs and they were having a hard time finding the main trail through the jumble ice, so we had to pick our own way through the jumble ice. This wasn’t ideal because it meant we had to go up and over and around all these big icebergs. The sled took quite a beating.. but eventually we made it through and luckily that was the end of the blowhole and wind. From there, we cruised the last 10 miles into Slaven’s Cabin, where we were met by Park Service employees and a nice warm cabin. The food at Slaven’s Cabin was absolutely spectacular, I got a nice warm 2 hour rest in the bunk room, and the coffee was strong - I felt like a brand new man leaving Slaven’s Cabin for our next run!

The next run was also a long, 55-mile traverse. We left Slaven’s in the early morning darkness and then had the fortune to watch a gorgeous sunrise over the tall river bluffs of the mighty Yukon River. This run was mostly uneventful, and we found a nice camp spot in a slough of the river for a nice afternoon rest. The final run from this campsite into Eagle was about 55-miles as well and we left right about sunset time (5:00pm). We travelled into Eagle nice and easy as well aside from one section of glare ice where the dogs wanted to follow other team’s sled runner tracks off of the trail to Trout Creek cabin. Eventually I was able to coax the dogs back to the trail and onward we went to Eagle. I was extremely happy to reach Eagle after the 160-mile, physically- and mentally-grueling Yukon River trail. In Eagle I made the difficult decision to drop Ivory J. as she was toughening out a weird soreness in the tendons of her wrist. This left me with 10 dogs - a solid core of strength and experience - to tackle the next big section of the race - 170 miles of the Taylor Highway to the finish line in Tok.

Our first run leaving Eagle took us up and over American Summit. This was a long, slow climb to the top of the Summit. Along the way, our friend Lauro and his team came up from behind us. Over the winter, we do tours with Lauro at Rod’s Alaskan Guide Service. When Lauro passed us, I think my dog team recognized him and figured we were at another day of tours at Rod’s because my team immediately matched his team’s speed and we followed right behind him the rest of the run to our camp spot. We would run with Lauro and his team for the remainder of the race to the finish line. The Taylor Highway, as I came to learn later, is extremely hilly. The snow on the trail also was the kind that didn’t set up well and was a little loose, meaning the dogs didn’t have good traction to pull up the hills. The snow also had a sticky effect on the sled runners, keeping the sled from gliding nicely. This all meant that I had to work my tail off - pedaling, kicking, and running - to keep the team and sled moving down the trail. Lauro and I camped our teams near each other about 45 miles from Eagle. This left us with about 50 miles yet to go to reach the last checkpoint of the race - Chicken. The run to Chicken was even hill-ier than the previous run, meaning even more effort was necessary to make it there. When the team finally made it to Chicken, I was thoroughly exhausted. I also had forgotten to pack a thermos on this race. This meant that I could get water to drink for myself at checkpoints and at camp spots, but that I didn’t have a method to carry it with me when I got on the runners and we took off. This left me with long stretches, especially on the Taylor Hgwy, without water, and with the exercise I was doing, I was starting to get dehydrated. I never plan to forget a thermos again! The checkpoint volunteers in Chicken cooked me up some chicken nuggets and chicken tenders, which hit the spot, and I took a nice nap to prep for the last run of the race to the finish line.

Lauro’s and my team travelled together on the 75-mile run to the finish line in Tok. At times, my team would be the front team and at other times, Lauro’s team would go out front. We made it up over the last summit of the race, Mt. Fairplay, and from there on the snow changed and the trail really improved. The team started to run easier and faster, which is always a big mental boost at the end of a long race like this. Twenty miles from the finish, the trail finally turned off of the Taylor Highway. The trail had a couple of big climbs from there until we got to the Tanana River crossing - about 5 miles from the finish. At this point, Lauro and I stopped our teams and put our bibs on and celebrated the moment. We were both exhausted but extremely excited to be approaching the finish. From there, Lauro’s team led in to the finish line, where he finished in 3rd place and I right behind him in 4th place.

The challenges never ceased throughout the race. Every run was more difficult than the one before. From tackling Rosebud and Eagle Summit back-to-back to the endless miles on Birch Creek to the piles of jumble ice to cross on the Yukon River to the long slow climbs of the Taylor Highway, this was the coolest mushing I’ve ever done with the dogs! There were many beautiful sights along the way and amazing people all throughout. This is the longest race I’ve completed yet, and it was a true test of my dog care, woodsman-ship, and team management skills.

Dogs: Peso, Lefty, Badger, Belle, Jackson, Marley, Pancho, Hoodoo, *Mario, *Yoshi, *Ivory J, Soda, *Oasis, Husker

Handlers: Deke and Eric

Start date: Feb 01, 2025 at 11:00am

Finish date: Feb 06, 2025 at 11:34pm

Total run time: 5d,12h,34m

*= Dog dropped from team throughout race

2025 Copper Basin 300

The Copper Basin 300 has become a fixture in our race season over the past couple of years. We REALLY love this race! The community, volunteers, race organizers, vets.. all of it is absolute top notch! And in 2025, our expectations of the race were exceeded again. We had a wonderful race and can’t thank the CB300 organization enough for all the fun.

The race started in downtown Glennallen, AK on January 11. The previous night we had drawn lucky bib #13 out of 32 total bibs drawn. For this 300-mile race we were allowed to start with 12 dogs. In my line-up I slotted Peso and Lefty as my two leaders. Peso has been my main leader for three years now, and Lefty (Peso’s sister) has been developing incredibly well over the past couple years and really itching for her first race to prove herself. On that note, this CB300 was Lefty’s first race EVER and she started out in lead! Absolutely incredible.. Behind the leaders, the tried-and-tested combo of Badger and Belle took the swing position. In team we had Jackson and Yoshi, Hoodoo and Ivory, and then Pancho and Marley. Turtle and Husker brought up the wheel position. We rocked out from the start line at 10:24 and almost immediately crossed overflow.. great… wet booties and wet feet… NOT how you want to start a race! But oh well.. nothing that can be done about it! On wards we go and about 5 miles from the start we pass the TRAILGATERS and they gifted us with a free hotdog! Can’t really beat that.. The first run of any race involves a lot of passing and being passed by other dog teams because everyone is starting two minutes apart and then settling into their groove. We passed a handful of teams in the first 10-20 miles of the race and then started moving steady towards the first checkpoint of the race - Tolsona Lake Lodge. The dogs cruised in there just around sunset and we camped out for a quick 2 hour rest.

After some chicken wings and french fries, I put booties on the dogs and we headed towards the second checkpoint - Lake Louise Lodge. This would be the shortest run of the race at 27 miles long. The local snowmachine club grooms and uses the trails between the lodges (like Tolsona and Lake Louise) extensively. As a result, the trail between lodges is like an interstate - well packed and FAST! We cruised the 27 miles to Lake Louise checkpoint averaging almost 10 mph. At Lake Louise, the team took a 4 hour rest to prepare for our next run to the Sourdough Campground checkpoint.

The distance between Lake Louise and Sourdough is roughly 54 miles. It’s a nice run with a little bit of elevation and also some traverses of large lakes. The first lake is Lake Louise as you’re leaving the checkpoint. I almost got disoriented out on the lake but luckily I ran the race last year and remembered roughly the direction I was supposed to be going on the trail. The second lake we crossed was Crosswind Lake.. and there was certainly a crosswind on Crosswind Lake! It was amazing.. most of the rest of the race trail there was no breeze at all. But as soon as we dropped onto Crosswind Lake.. BAM! Big crosswind. It was probably blowing about 25 to 30 mph, making for an exciting but not too difficult run across the lake for the dogs. The next lake we crossed was Fish Lake followed by skirting the bank edge of Middle Lake. Then we were on and in to Sourdough. However, the final stretch into the checkpoint includes a drop down the hill onto the Gulkana River. From here, you can see the lights of the checkpoint. It is just before 8am in the morning when the team and I are descending the hill, we have just ran from midnight through the wee hours of the morning, and I’m a little tired and my reaction time must’ve been a little slower. At the bottom of the hill, I misjudged a corner and the sled took a jarring hit right off of a fairly sizeable tree. I recollected myself, brought the sled back upright, did a quick examination to determine the sled looked like it had survived alright, and then took off for the last half-mile or so of running on the river into the checkpoint. I didn’t notice that during the collision with the tree I had lost a pretty important piece of equipment from my sled…

At Sourdough, the team rested for 3 hours. Our next run was going to be a 34 mile, extremely technical and very hill-y run in to Meier’s Lake checkpoint. The whisperings of volunteers and race officials told of extreme overflow just a couple of miles outside of Sourdough. As a result, I decided to not put booties on the dogs and have them run instead on bare feet. There is not much logic to putting booties on the dogs and then immediately having them get soggy from running through overflow early in a run. The booties will then fill with snow and/or ice and then need to be removed or just fall off altogether. Plus, the dogs prefer to be unbooted running through water - I think it feels better for them. About 10 miles into the run, we did encounter the overflow. We were crossing a small lake and the middle of the lake had gotten covered in water. The overflow was slushy and about boot-high deep. The dogs didn’t want to slog and go through the over flow, so I had to get off of the sled and walk them through to the other side. It was about 100 to 150 yards to get them to the other side. There, we recorrected the team and undid tangles. Then we were ready to keep moving! We mushed through the technical sections of trail where you really have to be paying attention driving the sled. Towards the end of the run we had some short but steep climbs. The climbs were fun because it was an opportunity for me to get off the runners and kick and run to help the dogs get the sled up to the top of the hills. In addition, Yoshi wasn’t having too much fun anymore running and so we were giving him (weighing in at about 60 lbs) a ride to the checkpoint in the sled. We rolled in to Meier’s Lake a little before 4:00pm, where we declared we would take our mandatory 6 hour rest plus differential.

Our next run was going to be the biggest and toughest run of the race - about 68 miles long with a feature along the way that they call “the Hump”. The Hump is a big hill along the trail with an elevation of about 4100 feet. We left Meier’s Lake in 4th place after our mandatory rest at about 10:12pm. We travelled along the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline for a while and then crossed over into the flats before the climb up the Hump. The trail crossed the Gakona River at about 3000’ elevation and then we started the climb up to the top of the hump. At the top of the hump, the trail was windblown and we were mushing on rocks and gravel. Additionally, the wind was blowing sideways at about 30 to 40 mph, making the trail across the top difficult to find and travel. But we made it across and then we had a long downhill run all the way to the checkpoint. Most of the trail was on an old mining road and was nice and easy running for the dogs. When we were just a couple miles from the next checkpoint (Chistochina), we came to the highway and started to run alongside it. We crossed up and over a driveway leading to a small gas station where a woman was spectating from the front porch. She hollered out to us as we passed and let me know that there was “a bit of overflow ahead”! I thanked her for letting me know and prepared myself for what I expected to be maybe a couple inches of water on top of the ice. But we made a left-hand turn to go under a bridge of the highway and faced the overflow directly ahead and I could see it was most definitely not just a couple of inches deep! The dogs also saw that the overflow was quite deep and came to a stop. Luckily they were still lined-out and facing in the right direction. I walked up to my leaders and helped them pull the dogs through the overflow. It was about thigh-high deep!.. meaning that the dogs were quite literally swimming to get to the other side. On the other side, I let the dogs shake the water out and roll in the snow. Then we continued on to Chistochina, only about a mile or two ahead.

We were the 5th team to arrive to Chistochina. I was excited because I had never run quite such a competitive race before and been so close to the frontrunners. Our team had to take 3 hours of rest at the checkpoint to fulfill our 18-hour combined total requirement of the race. We left about 30 minutes after the team in 4th place. The trail leading away from Chistochina was tough. It was soft, sugary snow and full of willows. The willows are distractions to the dogs, and when they are going slow on the trail, it slows them down even more. We were moving at about 5 mph (very slow!), and I was no longer thinking about catching the team in 4th place - I was worried about the teams behind me catching up to us! But, as the saying goes, if it’s tough for me, it’s tough for everyone. Every team was struggling to have any speed through this section of trail. We kept moving forward and eventually reached a trail down the power-line easement which then turned onto a wide trail that was groomed for the high school cross-country ski team. I had Lefty up in lead by herself, and when we reached this hard, nice trail, she took off! The team was flying - going at about 9-9.5 mph! I was ecstatic that we still had so much speed at the end of the race, and now I was excited again about chasing down 4th place! Eric and Deke were texting me updates from the tracker and encouraging me as we were closing the gap. We ran along the Copper River, climbed up the bluff above the river, and then passed under the highway to get on the west side of the Richardson Highway for the 15 miles or so run in to the finish line at Glenallen. The 4th place team had at one point had a 5 mile lead on us. When we hit the nice trail, our team had taken off and we had shortened that gap to just 2 miles. With 15 miles to go, it was going to be tough for us to close the gap completely, but I was hoping if we could get close enough, the team might see a headlight up ahead and get an even larger burst of speed. Alas, it was not meant to be though. The trail along the highway into Glenallen was filled with willows. The dogs would race on the open sections of the trail at about 9 mph but then have to drop down to 7 mph or so to pick their way through the willow patches to the next open section of trail where they would take off again at 9 mph. We continued running strong in to the finish line and the dogs really picked up the speed on the last mile or so of the trail. We came SCORCHING in to the finish line and finished in 5th place, just 12 minutes behind 4th place.

The 2025 Copper Basin was an incredible success for the team overall. The team and I ran the most competitive race schedule I’ve done to date, and it was a lot of fun! Lefty ran her first race ever and finished the race in solo lead - an absolute incredible accomplishment! We’ll definitely be back to this race soon for more fun adventures.

Handlers: Deke, Eric, and Pam Kerr (rookie race as a handler!)

Dates: January 11-13, 2025

Location: Glenallen, AK

Dogs: Peso, Lefty, Belle, Badger, Jackson, Yoshi*, Marley, Pancho, Hoodoo*, Ivory J, Turtle*, Husker

*= dropped from race, did not finish

2024 T-Dog 200

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

2024 Yukon Quest Alaska 300

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

2024 Copper Basin 300

2023 Willow 300