South Boundary Road, Porcupine Mountains

   We finally managed to sled on part of South Boundary Rd., which marks the boundary of Porcupine Mountains State Park in Michigan.  It's about a 35 mile drive or so one way to where we could hook up the teams. We've wanted to do it for several years now and it hasn't worked out in the past for one reason or another.  We heard that there was lots of snow up there, and now its just fun running the dogs-no more conditioning for racing, so we decided to just do it for once.  Of course, everyone tells you to get up there early so that the snowmobile traffic is less and in turn it's safer to be on the trail with dog teams.  Well, it turns out that it really wouldn't matter in my opinion, because first of all, the trail is obviously very wide because its a paved two way traffic road in the summer so if your team stays to the right, there's a ton of room for everyone to safely pass each other.  Also, unfortunately the road is plowed in six miles on our end (the western end) for logging, I guess, even though it looks like there's not much going on.  Those first six miles are mostly exposed pavement with very little to no room on the shoulders for snowmobile traffic to run on snow, even though it is a snowmobile trail (figure that out), so I'm pretty sure that snowmobilers have been avoiding it a little.   In any case, we saw very little traffic despite it being a Friday afternoon.  (We meant to get an earlier start, but stuff came up and it got later).
  So we hooked up two, nine dog teams six miles in where the snow part of the trail starts, ran to Summit Peak Trail Head and back, for a total of about 17 miles. Temps. were in the mid to upper 30's, too damn warm, but the dogs did well.  There's lots of hills, both up and down, a nice mix that made it fun-not too much up hill climbing.  Of course, when driving the road to Summit Peak, I never realized just how uphill you go-its a pretty steep, continuous climb, but coming back down is pretty fun.

Getting ready to hook up- the sunshine was beautiful, and miserable...

A huge, wide, perfect trail.

Hard to tell from a photo, but this is the road to Summit Peak Trail, and its very steep and long-about two miles...but it's a quick two miles back down: )