Food Drop is Culmination of Race Prep for Mushers, Personnel
photo courtesy of Yukon Quest. http://www.yukonquest.com/
In less than two weeks, dog teams will leave the Yukon Quest start chute from Fairbanks. Race excitement was in the air Saturday, as mushers in Canada and Alaska handed their drop bags over to race personnel. The bags are filled with everything teams will need along the 1000-mile race course.
In the early afternoon, veteran Yukon Quest musher Sonny Lindner pulled his truck and trailer into a parking lot in South Fairbanks to unload his drop bags for this year’s Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race.
This will be his seventh Quest run. Lindner says he hasn’t packed anything out of the ordinary in his drop bags this year.
“Well, there’s mostly dog food and then a little bit of people food and booties and runner plastic,” he says.
The Quest is nothing new for Lindner. He was the first musher ever to have won the race, back in 1984.
“Well, what I like is my kennel’s right up there by Two Rivers, and the trail goes right through the middle of my kennel. So I like going out that way because the one time I tried coming back that way it didn’t work very well.”
The race starts in Fairbanks this year and travels southeast to Whitehorse, Canada. Like Lindner, Fairbanks musher and Quest Rookie, Paige Drobny says her drop bags are mostly filled with dog food.
“Well, I guess I felt like I knew what I wanted in there,” she says, “I have seen a good portion of the trail, and so that makes it a little bit easier to know what to pack, but I definitely over-packed. As a rookie, not knowing how the dogs are going to be after a certain amount of miles, so I definitely packed a lot of dog food,” laughs Drobny.
But for Brent Sass, there’s at least one ‘people food’ item he won’t mush without.
“Candied bacon,” he laughs. “I gotta have that stuff.”
Josh Horst is the race manager for this year’s Yukon Quest.
“Man, it’s a really fun day,” he says. “Today’s a really exciting day for us. We get to see all the mushers for the first time. It’s sort of the culmination of a lot of work coming together and this is sort of a reunion for us this is one of the first events where a lot of volunteers that we don’t see all year, this is one of the first places we see each other, so it’s a really fun day all in all.”
Today, Horst directs more than 20 volunteers. They organize the drop bags on wooden pallets labeled with Quest Trail checkpoint names: Central, Eagle, Braeburn. Bags can’t weigh more than 40 pounds. They’re all clearly labeled with the musher’s last name and the checkpoint where the bags will be dropped off.
“After that,” explains Horst, “they have to give us an inventory of what’s in each bag. We need that for clearing customs when the bags cross into Canada. And then it’s whatever they need in there. It’s sort of up to their strategy, right? They don’t want to carry more down the trail then they need, but they also want to make sure they have everything in there that they do need, so a lot of it just comes down to them.”
Preparation is important in the Yukon Quest, but so is efficiency. Paige Drobny is confident she’ll find her bags among those of all the other mushers out on the trail. A long, tentacled stencil is spray painted in hot pink above her last name.
“It’s a squid!” she laughs. “Our kennel name is Squid Acres Kennel. I did my master’s degree studying squid and it’s about the only thing I have left of that, so we put it on all the drop bags.”
The race staff has two weeks to get all the drops bags where they need to go. Josh Horst admits the logistics can be challenging.
“It’s a tight timeline isn’t it? Yeah. It’s pretty intense. We’ve got a lot of work to get done,” he says. “But of course we have a few more days for what has to happen on the Canadian side. So some of those may get delivered a little be later because we don’t like to get ‘em into the communities too early, so we try to do everything a little last minute but pretty much everything on this side is gonna be done by about the 30th or 31st.”
Food drops also happened at the same time in Whitehorse Saturday. In two weeks, 25 mushers will set out from Fairbanks for the 29th running of the Yukon Quest.
