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