Saturday - 1st day of the Exxon Mobile

It was quite cold this morning at 8 am when we got up to feed breakfast to the dogs - moon"s" still out but much lighter than it has been and was up in Fairbanks! and the strong smell of evergreen in the air! Put the dogs back in and then took them out at 10 then took mine back out at 10:30 - the course was very fast and hard - I started out with a little bit of frozen fog on my goggles and then the gradually got worse and worse till I was looking out of a little corner of the lens and it was even foggy - kept my foot on the drag alot of the time because I couldn't see ahead very well and didn't remember if this was the same trail I ran practice on last year - it wasn't because I did 7.7 miles - I thought I would never get back - took me 29 minutes and something and so I am in last but got back safe without anything wrong except the goggles - don't know for sure what I will do tomorrow - they have never fogged up on me like that before -

Randy splinted his hand and we had lots of nice people help us get up to the line - and he was off with 18 dogs- he came back in one piece and with only a little blood on the dressing of his finger - he had to stop once because Hedwig was in a tangle again (the same dogs that caused the problem last Sunday because they are yearlings???!!!) and said the trail was a bit scary in several places- I agree with Ken Chezik's assessment of the trail - it's 16 miles long, 5 miles are flat and the rest is either downhill or uphill and always around a curve! Final place for today was 17th - not what he wanted but I guess you have to consider the circumstances and that the dogs haven't run in a week - tomorrow is supposed to be a bit colder but the day turned out to be very nice with the sun out -I didn't go up to it until Randy came back and the dogs were taken care of but the red and white tent you will see when I attach the pictures is where they had food and souveniers - I don't know if they had the 1000 people they expected but it was very nice!