March 6, 2003

You're not going to believe the day that I had yesterday. It was like a bad comedy, every time I would head towards the computer to do the day's diary entry, someone would show up or something would happen. It started first thing in the morning, I was two feet away from the computer when the phone rang, It was Jamie Nelson. While Jamie and I talked, Katherine, (one of the handlers) swooped in and got on the computer. 

I decided to go for a shower and when I got out of the shower company had started to arrive, and kept arriving all day. There should be a revolving door on the front of this house. Throw in dog chores, catching loose puppies (twice), half a dozen more phone calls and the day was pretty much shot. I finally sat down at 10:00 last night and did a diary entry, and when I hit send, it disappeared. So I went to bed.

Enough about me. Karen phoned me on March 4th to tell me that she was bored. She was about half an hour away from leaving Manley. Her plan was to stay there eight hours, and she was looking for ways to kill time. I suggested sleeping. She said that the checkpoint was full of rumors on trail conditions and mileages, but she's been around long enough to ignore them. Its really hard to talk to someone who is sleep deprived, you never know what little thing you might say that will send their spirits into the gutter. Anyway I think that I managed to say all the right things, this time because she left Manley shortly after we hung up. They should not let tired mushers near phones.

The update sheet shows that Karen has dropped a dog, but she never phoned me, and knowing how much she likes to talk on the phone when she is tired, this seems a little strange. If she did drop a dog, I don't know who it is. All I can do is wait for a phone call from the prison. But it wouldn't be the first time that they showed a musher leaving a checkpoint with 15 dogs and showing up at the next checkpoint with 16.

The trip from Tanana to Ruby is along one. In the three different sources that I have for trail mileages the shortest one says 115 mile. There is also a lot of snow on the river, so its slow going. The front runners are taking more than twenty hours to get there. Karen mentioned something about camping twice along the way, I agreed. Handler Rule #11 "Always agree with your tired mushers race strategy".

Later
Mark