So it’s February and we’re having some excellent weather for this time of year. It’s currently 11 above, yes I said above zero, imagine that. Good snow on the ground again, even after the warm spell we had and it’s comfy out.
This is Iron Dog week and the finish line will be in downtown Fairbanks for the first time. The race has been finishing at Pike’s which is just on the out skirts of town and the natural progression of things was to go downtown and bring some more fame to our city.
I think it’s a great move and since I’m also on the Iron Dog board these days, anything to help promote it works for me. Been lots of rumors and whatnots about the finish in town, naysayers and neardoers all up in a tissy about it and how dangerous it’ll be. Well, you how it goes, we always have those few that won’t be happy no matter what happens. Cancel the Iron Dog altogether and they’ll start complaining about the loss of income to the local businesses. What can I say.
So my weekend is pretty much planned, trail marking tomorrow to make it safe (see above), finish line duties on Saturday and then the FST’s annual Sweetheart run on Sunday. One of my favorites, but enough about what’s to come, I’ll write about this weekend later.
Last weekend was a blast. Took 2 days off of work and made it a four days weekend. Drove south of Cantwell and went exploring with my buddy Dean. Actually it was a work / fun trip. We brought some property together and we had to go and find it 😉 yeah, we should have done that before we signed the purchase papers, but what we had seen earlier on looked impressive, so we went and finalized the deal. I got to use my new Garmin Rhno 520 GPS, had preset the coordinates for the corners and what I thought would be the trail in.
Guess I should mention that there isn’t a road into the property, so we had to improvise a bit and make our way through the woods. How I do love to explore, especially when there’s 5 feet of snow on the ground and no one’s been on it.
We’ll we found the property corners and even marked the property lines, this took 2 days, Thursday and Friday. Now here we are with our basic “must do” done, as far as our plans went, so what else is a guy to do. All this open country and time on our hands, so we explored. I wanted to make it to Chulitna, a whistle stop for the train, but no town as far as we know. So off we go, hit the Intertie and followed it till it got to steep to ride, back tracked to this wide valley we just came out of and followed it. In and out, in and out, turns out it’s a nice wide valley with a fairly deep creek running down it. And of course the creek doesn’t go in a nice straight line, oh on, it has to meander from one side to the other and so do we.
Now Dean’s leading and I get to go over his tracks, explaination, I get to follow him and cross over those O’so little bits of open water when the ice broke. Thank goodness it wasn’t deep. On we ride and stop at this one spot in the woods and I see what looks like train tracks, naw, were not that close, are we ? Anyway, we keep on winding down the valley and get to a point where the hill were sort of following closes in next to the train track and low and behold there’s a train.
Not just any train, but a passenger train and it has stopped. So Dean keeps on riding and starts to play on the hill side and I stop next to the train wondering why would they stop here… ? next thing I know the train moves up a 100 feet and its full of passengers taking our pictures. Best I can figure is that why I’m wondering why they’ve stopped, their wondering just where in the h e double l we came from. They had their cameras clicking and videos rolling, s it looks like Dean and I will be one of the main attractions back home next month in Europe, Japan, or wherever their from. Our 15 minutes of fame.
We finished the day by finding a trail, not just an old trappers trail like I’m use to seeing now and again in these back country rides, but a nice 4 to 5 foot wide “groomed” trail. I’ll bet that trail was smoother than a baby’s backside. So we rode along the trail figuring it’s heading in the direction we need to go anyway, and low and behold it takes use right back to the entrance we used to get to the property. Nice.. Next trip down we’ll have to follow it and see if it goes all the way to Chulitna. I know the wives are going to love having a nice smooth trail to ride on with lots of untouched snow for the guys to boondock in. Tyler is going to love this place :big_grin:
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