copper dog day 3

Day 3 of the 2014 Copper Dog 150 began with early to catch teams lining up in Copper Harbor in the very tip of Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula. The air felt a bit brisk in town and the wind really whipped our helmets around as we tore up the trail to the top of Brockway Mountain. Finding the trail crew huddled behind a shelter confirmed our suspicions of a windchill around -40F. No worries. Our half-frozen, half-hot breakfast burritos from The Pines (our fault, not theirs, ha!) and a few layers of feathers and fur were all we needed to keep us from freezing. And by freezing - the kind of freezing where your breath frosts the end of your hair, and your nose gets burned from touching the glass on the back of a camera held to your face. That kind. We worked to frame the teams in a scene that looks more Arctic than Michigan then leapfrogged them at various points on the way down to the finish in Calumet. A larger than expected crowd greeted the teams with the enthusiasm as if they had just crawled out of a lunar capsule. And they kind of did...