It was a blast. New years eve/ NY Day have never measured up since. That includes new years 2010 in Vegas. Vegas was full on glitz drunk fest, & I got more than my legal share of wet smooches from a group of youngish skanks women.

But its still a vm distant 2nd behind those Big Lake Sled Rally's. And for those I had the wife along, Still, always- participation- creating your show- is so much more fun that watching the show.

Ps- the annual Idaitarod Dog Sled race. " The last great race". Has its traditional restart at the north trail head at Big Lake. Theres actually about 6 trail heads on big lake. 2 grromed for x-country skiing. Big fine if you are caught on ski trails with anything other than skis. The other 4or 5 trail heads are groomed for sleds and they branch off in different directions creating a 2k mile trail system for snow machines & dog sleds/snow shoes in winter. Plenty of people do over nighters on those trails. Running to various mountains and a couple villages. As well. If one really wanted to. You can ride the entire iditarod route all the way up to Nome. Much planning required creating fuel/ supply caches to make that 1200 miles run. Only about the 1st 200 miles of that trail is groomed as part of the Big lake trail system. After the Iditarod in run. About 2 weeks later they have a snow machine race on the same trail. "The Iron Dog". Thise fellas are absolutely HARDCORE. They make that 1200 mile run nearly straight through.
The dog race usual lasts around 10/11 days. The iron dog is usually over in about 44-46 hours.

Temps for both races grow increasingly sub zero every mile northward. Until the get through rainy pass & head towards the coast. Rainy pass signals the end of warm weather(-5°- 20°) the temps flip usually to -20 /-40 or worse. They need those temps so theres shoreline sea ice to run on. But that stuff is treacherous with the tides creating buckled ice & chasm sized fractures. Those miles up the coast seperate the winners/ losers. Take the wrong line & you get blocked by buckled ice, require you to double back. If you get lucky. You arrive on the sea at slack tide- with clear visibility allowing your "team" a fly over to scout a clean route right before you arrive. If your unlucky. You arrive as the tide is surging spraying water with each buckling ice shift and shrouding everything in ice fog.

Back in the early days. Nobody scouted by air. Those old timers walked their lead dog. Only a pair of binoculars to scout your own path. Reading the ice was as much or more important as the quality of your dog team.

Hardcore mf-ers those iditarod men/ women.

Me? I stuck to the well groomed trails. Always an eye on gas & approximating miles traveled/ miles to return. Always caching a 5gallon can of gas on the main trail somewhere. All the trips we took out there. We had 2 break downs. A steering cross bar snapped on a Polaris- man that was a pain to tow back. The other was a circuit board that fried on a nearly new RMK. At least you could steer that one in tow.

With the polaris. We tried many ways to tow it. What worked best, we lashed the ski tips together like a skier snow plowing. Looped the tow rope with the ratchet strap. And the polaris rider got a workout leaning hard on even the slightest turns. Every body drunk probably didnt help the adventure. And of course. Both breakdowns occured far from the cabin instead of in the 1st hour.
Lol- but of course!