AK Trip--Days 10-11, March 12-13, 2007

Another lazy couple of days, with a little more activity. After updating the blog yesterday, I went up to the art show at the St. Joe's Catholic Church, and then we had an early dinner and a few games of Quiddler.

Today we (Dad, Cousin Megan and I) headed out to geocache and snowmachine towards the cabin at Dexter. After making our way through the gravel plant over a series of turns and twists (there's less snow on the ground there than I can ever remember), we found our way to the top of Anvil Mountain, where we sought out the Anvil Mtn. geocache...here's me checking the GPS with Dredge #5 in the far distance.



From the top of Anvil Mountain, we determined that the cache had to be downhill about 1/4 of a mile. We saw a pretty good group of muskox on the way down. These guys were the closest...




After digging around in the snow a while within 20 feet of the cache location, we decided to give up the fight (Megan will have to return in summer and report her findings!). Dad snapped a photo of me and Megan at the top of Anvil after our hike back up...



On our way back over the top of Anvil towards Dexter, I got Dad to snap a photo of mye "hanging out" on one of the old communication towers (that look like big shark fins..if you look really close below the whitish door, you'll see me dangling there)



And now, today's race report...Lance Mackey won the 2007 Iditarod while we were out on our snowmachine adventure. He came in under the burled arch at about 8PM. We heard a bit of it on the radio before our trip back into town. He sounded pretty happy, and made history by being the first one to finish first in the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod in the same year.

Paul Gebhardt finished approximately two hours later, while we were in cuz Pat's house eating a delicious dinner of lasagna and some sort of beef stroganoff.

So, now we have a race (it is currently 2:40 AM) for third place between Zack Steer and Martin Buser, our main man, between Safety and Nome. They are less than 20 miles from Nome, and apparently only minutes apart. It will be interesting to see if Martin makes it a race and tries to pass Zack on the way into town, after leaving Safety only 4 minutes behind. Although tired, I think we'll probably be up for a while more here and go downtown and check out the scene at the finish line. Stay tuned!