Jay Leppanen

Monday night, Amber, Naomi and I went out to the Chena Hot Springs Resort, a checkpoint located about 60 miles from town by road and 100 trail miles from the finish line.

I brought a mini-DV camcorder. Amber had a digital camera. Naomi was outfitted with a audio recorder. We found the media room set up in a banquet area of the resort’s big log cabin restaurant. Photographer John Hagen and writer Matiais Saari, of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, were already set up inside. They were using laptop computers to transmit photos and stories back to their newsroom in Fairbanks.

At about 10 p.m. we headed outside to look for mushers. It was quiet and very cold.

The old resort is a sprawling place, marked by numerous cabins, a bathhouse and other outbuildings. It was difficult to find mushers or anyone else connected to the race for interviews. Matias had told me that the dog teams were camped for the night on the resort’s airstrip. I couldn’t find it in the dark.

In the morning I finally found the airstrip, along with a sign; “No Media,” it proclaimed. Teams apparently were camped in the trees, but you couldn’t see them until mushers were on the move. Interviewing racers was only practical upon their arrival at this checkpoint.

The cold seemed to affect the camcorder in several ways. The first few seconds of video had blue horizontal lines through it. It would only clear up when watching it; even then the tape was ruined.

We interviewed a handler who worked for Hans Gatt. She had two of his dogs dropped from his team, McKinley and Ruby. They were excited and playful. One of them was a lead dog.

It was minus 35 degrees that night at the finish line. I almost froze along with the camcorder while waiting an hour for Gatt. I had to put the camcorder in my jacket to keep it warm. I had looked up his estimated arrival time on the internet and didn’t expect to stay there for so long. It was an interesting time because there was a lot of media, fans and UAF students. Many people huddled around a bonfire in a burn barrel, but I was stuck with the rest of the shivering media on the wrong side of a fence.