Dark Start

We had an early day on the trails today. We arrived at the Boreas Winter trailhead before sunrise and used our headlamp to navigate the path until we got into the open moonlight and eventually into the early dawn sunlight.

Headlamp is off - we are now "skijoring by moonlight".

At the trailhead, it was pretty dark and the headlamp was necessary to illuminate the path. You need to have a lot of confidence in your skijoring partners to trust them to safely follow the trail in such darkness. But, that is Max & Zorro - I have the utmost confidence & trust in their sleddog abilities to follow and maintain the trail anywhere!

A visual progression of our early day on the trails is below:

At the trailhead - focus the headlamp on the white butts and follow the Siberians
up the trail.

Out of the thick trees and into a little bit of moonlight to assist the headlamp, which
is still centered on the Siberians as I follow their lead on skis.

Eventually ... Sunrise! We are so far up Boreas by this point that it is a single track ski
trail. Everyone hop in line as we continue along.

And, then, a little further up and we are laying fresh tracks in 3-6 inches of snow!
It did not snow overnight, but the strong winds on Boreas have created this layer of 3-6 inches
to plow through.

The sun has finally come over the mountains to light up the day; but we were about 10 minutes
from returning back to the trailhead when we got our first set of shadows on the trail.

This was "day 2" of our "mini iditarod" and we covered 10.7 miles with 1150 feet of elevation climbed and a top speed of roughly 20 MPH.

Our total stats after 2 days: 22.6 miles and 2600 feet of elevation climbed.

Top speed and distance covered for today's outing.