Jack Pine 30

We traveled with our new trailer over to Gwinn, Michigan so Jeremy could race the Jack Pine 30, which was a 26 mile, six dog race included in the U.P. 200 and Midnight Run weekend in Marquette, Michigan.  He decided to run Thunder, George, Scout, Hail, Scooby Doo, and Chico.  They came in 10th out of 15 with a time of 2:45:56 for the 26 miles.  We are happy enough with that time, as we were expecting it to only be 18 miles and only found out it would be 26 miles at the musher meeting an hour and a half before the race start.  We have mostly been training only about 20 miles and the dogs actually hadn't run at all for a week prior to the race because our trailer broke and we bought a different trailer and were working on it for the whole week before and literally up until the time we left on Friday morning to head over to Gwinn.  We went over Friday so that we could watch the start of the Midnight Run Friday night, then stay over and be at the musher meeting at 8 am on Saturday, then the race start at 9:30 am.  After the teams headed out on the trail, us handlers had to drive the trucks to the other end of the course to meet them.

At the finish.

After the race-we had to park the dog trucks on the side of a highway, but it worked out okay.

George.

The trailer worked out nice on its maiden voyage-about 300 miles there and back, plus some driving around while we were over there.  It started out a long time ago as a pop up camper, but had long since been gutted to be a hauling trailer.  We had our eye on it for a while, because we really want a bigger trailer with two axles and enough room for more dogs and to haul four wheeler(s) or snowmobile(s).  When our small trailer's bearings went out when we drove it to Marenisco about a week and a half ago, we decided to just go buy this trailer.  The guy we bought it from had built a little shack on it, for what, I don't know, but the first thing we did was remove it, which meant we unfastened it and pushed it off the back.

You can see the shack laying upside down behind the trailer-forgot to take a pic before, but I think you can get the idea.

Jeremy had to build a frame for under the dogbox to get it up above the wheel wells of the trailer.

We had Jeremy's two brothers come over to help move the extremely heavy dogbox over to the new trailer.  Futuer plans are to build a single row of boxes on the back, and build the frame of it up to support four wheelers ar snowmobiles on top of it.