Okay welcome back to our blog.  I have been locked out for a year or so.  We had trouble with security and log in.  So now I will catch up on the whole season.  A bit at a time. 

    early in the Fall Rachel had announced that this would be her final season as a competitive racer.  It didn't come as a surprise to us as she had talked about it the year before.  The problem is how in the world do you do this.  We have no idea.  We had been in the sport for 25 yrs now and didn't really know how this would happen.
   The talk at the beginning of the season was to try something different this yr.  So we chose to race some of the adult races.  Usually we head north to Alaska to race the preliminary junior races and Leanne would race the adult races with Rachel's dogs because until this yr Rachel was not of age to be allowed to race in the adult races in Alaska.  We decided to head south of us and try some of the adult races.
   The season ended up starting very very cold and no snow.  Not much here for snow but Alaska had no snow and the season started out with race cancellations.  Our first race was down in Grande PRairie and it was a late start for us.  We headed down there and the trail was pretty crazy with lots of turns and places where a person could have problems if you are not used to racing on this kind of trail.  We are used to racing in Alaska.  Very Wide, very flat straight trails where speed is the determining factor to the outcome of the race.  Rachel had a leader that would run right off the trail before they noticed a sharp turn in the trail.
   This is much different than what happens north in alaska.  In the north the trails are there for dog mushing.  So they never change and they are always the same condition. The start to groom the trails at the beginning of the snow falls.  Down south the venues are used for different things.  So the trails can be changed last minute and they even had horses walking on the dog trails while they tried to prepare a race trail.  Kinda like comparing oranges to apples.

    After we left Grande Prairie Rachel felt as though she had allot of trouble and her dogs lost confidence and so did Rachel.  So we needed to go race where she could have clean runs.  No troubles no shut downs no bad passes nothing like this. 
  Her schedule conflicted with allot of the races so we never did much for traveling after Grande Prairie so we decided to try a local race. 
  The trail was very rough so she had to keep the speed down on her dogs incase she injured someone. It was also a bit longer than what we usually race but it was a one day race and the purpose was to have one clean run. 
   Rachel left the starting chute and it wasn't long and she ran into a woman waving her down.  Rachel stopped and the woman wanted to get into the basket and get a ride. Rachel let her ride on her runners until she came up to a team stopped on the side of the trail. The woman got off. Rachel took off and then ran into a loose team with out a driver and had to follow it all the way around the race trail.  Another disrupted run with all kinds of problems. 
   We then sit at home and train for weeks waiting for a race close enough and with the right timing to go too to race.