Iditarod 2017 – Day 1

by Bryan

7 comments

1 JuanitaM { 03.07.17 at 8:52 pm }

Internet has been down since last night, but Centurylink got it back up this evening. Have no idea what took it down. Weird, last Friday the power was off for maintenance, and today Centurylink was down. What the heck? Oh well, it seems fine now.

Just checking out the stats here and noticed that Aliy is presently in the lead. Hope all her dogs stay healthy and happy this year. She deserves a good experience this go round. What happened last year was just obscene, and I’m surprised Jeff King didn’t hunt the damned snow machiner guy down.

Did you hear what health issues Otto Balogh was having? That’s the fastest scratch I every remember seeing in the race.

I see that Karin Hendrickson is back again this year. She had that terrible accident where her back was broken a couple years ago, and last year was pretty tough on her.

2 JuanitaM { 03.07.17 at 9:12 pm }

P. S. Just noticed that it will be -29 degrees in Manley Hot Springs tonight. Ah, springtime in Alaska!

3 Bryan { 03.07.17 at 10:11 pm }

It was -45° in March in Fairbanks when I took my Arctic survival course – things get really weird at those levels of cold.

I think Otto had a very bad reaction to the cold. If you aren’t used to it and dressing for it, it can be very hard to breathe. If you have nasal congestion, which is rare in the interior of Alaska, breathing through your mouth can be very nasty because the air is still very cold without the smaller and longer path when you breathe through your nose. The purpose of the snorkel parka is to create a small chamber of warmer air in front of your face.

Karin is back and so is Zoya with her group of ‘rescues, runts, and rejects’.

A lot of people are surprised that Jeff didn’t go after him. He must be mellowing in his old age.

Aliy is really tired of finishing second. This is a good trail for her, and for John Baker. They have cold weather teams. John has some of Lance’s dogs on his team for the first time.

It is going to be cold on the Yukon because some areas are cold sinks – when the really, really cold air flows into low spots.

4 JuanitaM { 03.08.17 at 9:37 pm }

Internet was down again for a while this evening. Who knows what they are doing, but it sure is a PITA when it happens. Strange, I’m old enough to remember a time when there was NO internet. Now a few hours without it and it seems like a big deal. Ridiculous.

He must be mellowing in his old age.

No kidding. I always had the impression that even relatively minor annoyances would set his hair on fire. I still think he has a plan, but he will let enough time pass so no one will associate him with a missing person.

I still cannot figure out how in the world you managed to survive in those temperatures. Maybe it’s because I’m from the south, but I plan to visit Alaska some day…during the summer months. In my opinion whoever sent you out in -45 degree weather on a survival course, had no real interest in whether you actually survived or not.

5 Bryan { 03.08.17 at 10:24 pm }

The military has good gear that is bought by Alaskans when it is declared surplus. It isn’t as light or flexible as the new stuff you can spend hundreds to thousands on, but it will keep you warm. There was classroom work to explain how to dress for those temperatures. It was a matter of layering so you could take off a layer if it got too hot.

I had CenturyLink before I switched to cable because of the cost, but the outages were almost always related to software updates. When they deploy the new software if it fails, the segment being updated goes down. It sounds like they had to reset the customer database which requires taking your circuit down and then reinstalling it.

Yes, we didn’t know we needed it until it was gone. I was without television so long in so many different places that it never became a necessity for me.

I’m with you on Jeff King – there is a plan and someone is in for a nasty surprise.

6 JuanitaM { 03.10.17 at 12:42 pm }

Glad to hear you had good gear. All I know is that there is no gear good enough to coax me into -45 degree weather. lol. I admire people who can do it, but it’s just blows my mind. It was -10 degrees here one night last winter, and I had no inclination to step outside at all.

And I really shouldn’t complain about Centurylink. I’ve had them for several years, and they have been extremely dependable all that time. The outage the other night was unusual, so I guess it was surprising to me when I had an outage again the very next day. Everything has been working fine since then. I negotiated a really good price with them, so I’m a satisfied customer overall.

7 Bryan { 03.10.17 at 5:12 pm }

It exactly my idea to camping at those temperatures, or even going outside, but the Air Force wasn’t offering any alternatives. 😉

My first complaint is that my agreement was with Sprint which sold out to Embarq which was bought by CenturyLink. Other than that was the constantly increases in price. The service was OK, and their techs knew what they were doing.