The roster of people who signed up on the first day. Photo by volunteer, Seth Barnes
It’s official! Since the day Cody rolled into the Fairbanks finish line last winter he has been dreaming about getting back out there for another go at it. Last year Cody had a nice rookie run that we are proud of, despite the fact that he suffered a bad knee injury 2 days before the start and was hobbling around the hole time. The knee is doing better after a summer of biking and low impact rehab. The dogs in last years team were made up primarily of 2 year olds who were racing for their first season with only a handful of veterans from Paige’s 2012 team. They did awesome in the quest, with 6 of those 2 year olds finishing. Nine dogs that ran with Cody in the Quest went on to run in Paige’s Iditarod team. She also had a few more 2 year olds in her team that didn’t run with Cody. Last year we put all of our young dogs to the test and got them through these long races and some tough expedition training. This year the dogs will be back with a knowledge of the trail and will be much stronger. We cannot wait to see how they do! We currently have about 40 dogs in the race pool for this coming winter. We would love to put two teams in the Quest so that the Iditarod team could be made completely of Quest finishers. That however would take an enormous amount of resources and money. If things pull together, we may sign up another team, or at least a 300 team, but for now, it will just be Cody. If you are interested in sponsoring Team Squid, please visit our dog sponsor page.
Another exciting thing related to the Yukon Quest is that we just became Partners with Skype in the Classroom. We’ll write more on this later this week and talk about all our exciting plans with this new program. We will be connecting with schools throughout the season via video chatting to teach them about dog mushing, sled dog science and these races. We have a lesson planned on the Yukon Quest race and we hope to be able to have Cody link to one lucky classroom during his 36 hour layover in Dawson City. If you are a teacher and interested, please visit our Skype in Classroom profile. We are currently looking for a corporate sponsor who would like to be a lead sponsor on funding the equipment and service costs of this educational program.
Cody took an abundance of video on this past year’s Yukon Quest and we decided to put it together into a mini-documentary. Take a watch if you have an extra 23 minutes of time! Thanks to the Yukon Quest for allowing us to use video footage from their photographers. We hope you enjoy. We hope do more of this in the future, so please let us know what you think.. to long, to boring, not sure what is happening… leave a comment with constructive feedback. Thanks!
ONLY 6 months and 1 day until race time!! Let the fun begin