Balloch this year was really an advert for the Gwaihir Kennel.
The Gwaihir dogs certainly saved the day for a few mushers on the Sunday. Balloch Wood really started on the Friday when Helen and I went round to mark out the trail, aided by Scott who claimed to have finished work early. Armed with hammer, string, markers and Lady-P’s tub of sweeties, we set off for a scenic drive round the trail. Having been on a previous ‘marker counting’ trip, I was happy in the knowledge everything would go smoothly……maybe not! Round about marker 20 Helen pipes up and says ‘We don’t have enough markers. We are going to run out.’ To which I reply, ‘We should have. I counted them last time and wrote them all down.’ Scott is busy hammering pins in and trying not to laugh. Helen then says, ‘Well, we are going to run out. Are you sure you counted them all properly?’ Not wanting to enter into an ‘it’s your fault not mine’ discussion I shrug my shoulders and say ‘Oh well.’ We drive on to the next marker and I quietly start to doubt my maths skills. We do run out of markers and feeling rather puzzled, I note down how many we need to bring for tomorrow so the mushers don’t get lost. Scott at this point is sitting quietly in the backseat sooking orange fizzes and wondering why he agreed to come in the first place. Next morning as the usual crowd start to arrive in the woods, Helen shows me the paper that I had originally noted down the number of markers on to prove that I had miscounted. I was counting in bundles of five. The four vertical dashes and one diagonal through, you know….to make five. Whilst I fell about laughing Helen explained she thought it meant four and didn’t have a clue what the diagonal line was for. She had never seen this before. They obviously didn’t teach this pre – Falklands. Laughing like idiots, Helen and I headed off to check the trail and put out the remaining markers.
The weather was cold and dry and the trail had no ice or frost this time, but unfortunately the trail surface turned out to be harder than it looked and felt underfoot due to the cold temps overnight and some dogs wore quicks down on the Saturday. The trail distances were 5.8, 6.4 and 7.2 miles. We were unable to get 9 miles this year due to harvesting. I don’t think anyone missed ‘that hill’ though. Team sizes varied from 2 dogs to 7 dogs this year and consisted of Siberians or Malamutes. Jay, Mathew and Steve were the only mushers to run the same team both days. David and Kirsty were only there for the Saturday. Cameron, Stuart and Scott each had a dog come in with worn quicks, so Helen brought half her kennel for them to run on the Sunday. This accounts for team size changes and times over the two days. Apart from worn quicks all the dogs enjoyed themselves and were happy coming over the finish. The trail on Sunday had much more give as it had not been so cold overnight and there were no foot problems on the Sunday. We had no ‘heavy rigs’ this time although Jay did double rig with Brian Cutter. I even ran two dogs round the 5.8 mile trail on the scooter! As always thanks to Helen for organising the event and the loan of dogs. Hope everyone enjoyed themselves and it was nice to see John and Kari stopping by and dishing out some very valuable advice to us all.
