Thank you all for your letters and phone calls to my Dad wondering what happened and how my team and I are doing. I will try to write back when I can, but I will not have time until I am back home in WA:) I am in Grayling right now at the school computer and it's about 1:00am. I am still on race mode, meaning I can't sleep for very long at a time. My team is doing great and don't really know why we are still sitting here and letting all the other teams leave! From Corrie's posts you know what happened so I won't go on about that. I talked with her today and she will be putting up another post with some more information as to what is happening now.
It was a long night....trying to make the call. In the early morning light with the trees still on fire from the rising sun I walked out to the river to take a look. I saw that there is no trail leaving here as it has completely blown in and the temps had dropped again with the wind chill at about 50 below. Also considering that it was taking the pack in front of me 13hrs to do the next leg and the going was very, very hard. I talked to Rick Larson by satellite phone the night before when he got into the Eagle Is. Checkpoint to get his thoughts on the matter. He said I know my dogs and what was best for them and that I would always take the right course of action. I walked back to my team, kneeling down on the straw, I took my only remaining leaders heads in my hands, Aspen and Petunia. Looking into their soft eyes, I know they would give me every last bit of mental strength they had left if I asked them to. Why? Because they trust me to always make the right call for them and never have I let them down, they know that, so they would give me everything they have....and because of that I kissed them on the nose, tucked them back into their straw "cave", walked straight into the communications building and stated my intention to scratch from the race. My team was ready to go, my leaders were ready to go, and I was ready to go. But not this year, Nome will have to wait. And because of my scratch I will have a team that is ALWAYS ready to GO!
It will be hard for a while, scratching is harder than any race I have ever run. Thank you again for all your letters and notes. I am getting tired now and a bit emotional. I will go out to my team again and lay down with each and every dog, as I have done, it seems, a thousand times today and thank them for running for me and tell them what a great job they have done!
Love, Laura