This was the Fairbanks Snow Travelers annual Sweetheart Run from Fairbanks to the Monderosa Restaurant in Nenana. The Monderosa is known for their Mondo Burgers and always worth the ride down for lunch.
The temps were great at something around 14 above, still lots of snow on the trails and 24 sleds showed up. We started out around 9:45 AM and took our time and had a nice easy ride down since the Monderosa doesn’t open until noon on Sunday’s, there was no reason to hurry.
We did cross some open spots and at one point, about 16 miles down river, I came over an ice shelf and discover a nice big open hole and was going just a bit too fast to stop, Ooops, it was a throttle down moment and a short skip. Decided to stop and take a break and make sure everyone was ok and we were off again.
As you can see in the video on the FST web site, we did cross some narrow ice bridges, seems there were more of these than I’m use to, but they were all solid enough to cross over.
Arrived at the Monderosa around noon, and had a good sit down lunch and then we headed to the Chevron for fuel, for those that needed fuel anyway. Lost two of our group here when the fuel pump went out on a sled, OK on the Arctic Cat they were riding. Dean and I stayed to help and ended up fast peddling it to catch up to the main group. Was a blast being able to open up the Bearcat and see how that 4 stroke did at 70 MPH, she handled pretty good and even turned better than I thought she would when I came across some open leads I wasn’t expecting.
Anywho, we caught up the main group and Dean took off on his own to try and make it back home by 4:30 for his date with the wife, hope he got there in time. About half way back we lost 3 more folks who decided they wanted to go just a bit faster than we were as a group and that dropped us down to 18 sleds.
I did mention there was a bit more open leads than I’m use to seeing and so I tried to keep a memory mark on where these were. So when we got close to the worst one I figured I’d do a jaunt around it, since I’m leading I took off to the right and expected folks to follow. Humm, John L. was behind me and he thought, or so he said, that I was going off to play in the powder. The short of it is they all rode right into the spot with the open leads were and everyone got to do some more water skipping, it wasn’t much, maybe 6 feet across, but I know a few folks stopped and contemplated that little open swimming hole before they crossed it.
Well we all made it back to our rigs around 4:30 and everyone agreed it was a good day and great ride.