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A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
Musher Alex LaPlante of Esko heads into the Beargrease 120 Sunday with her team of eight dogs led by Monax, the gray dog on the right. LaPlante said Monax somehow always manages to stay clean. "She doesn't get covered with frozen spit, or mud," LaPlante said of her favorite lead dog. "She's kind of like the queen." By contrast, LaPlante said she almost didn't recognize the dog on the back right, her own dog. "He's covered with so much snow and frost he looks like a different dog," she said.
Cloquet musher Betsy Ingram-Diver races in the Beargrease 40 on Sunday. It took Ingram-Diver and her team of dogs four hours to finish the course. She said she normally likes to handle the dogs while her daughter, Billie, races them but Billie is pregnant this year.
Esko musher Alex LaPlante said the arc of emotions in a sled dog race or even training can easily go from terror to sadness to absolute joy.
"If a dog isn't doing well, I'll get this feeling in the pit of my stomach," she said. "Then I'll make a change and if it goes well, then I'm happy and the dogs are happy. And it's simply amazing when you're gliding through the woods with no noise except their panting and the occasional jingle from their harness."
LaPlante was one of two Carlton County women to compete in one of the Beargrease races this past weekend. LaPlante ran the Beargrease 120 - formerly known as the mid-distance race - for the seventh time and placed sixth, her second best finish in that race. Cloquet's Betsy Ingram-Diver competed in the Beargrease 40, formerly known as the recreational race, starting and finishing on Sunday.
While Ingram-Diver completed her race in just under four hours, LaPlante finished her 114 miles just after 8:04 a.m. the next day, racing from the start point at Billy's Bar to Two Harbors, then Finland, then on to Lutsen with her team of eight dogs. According to the results page, her total time on the trail was 10 hours and 58 minutes, with 8 hours and 20 minutes of rest time.
It might have been less, she said, but her lead dog, Monax, hurt herself on the second leg of the race. She had to bring up a less experienced leader, and left Monax behind in Finland.
"She's been my leader for four years," LaPlante said, noting that all her lead dogs are female but Monax is the best. "She is the brains of the outfit. She understands the race, the terrain, everything. Without her, toward the end of the race, the younger leaders were doubting my decision making and wondering if we were ever going to get to the end. If she had been there, her confidence would have allowed us to go a little bit faster."
LaPlante said she got interested in dog sledding in high school when Susan Butcher was one of the first women to race in and then win (four times) the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Alaska. Although LaPlante grew up just outside of Minneapolis, her family had a cabin near Grand Marais and she started spending more time in northern Minnesota. After she and her husband got married, they used to volunteer at the Beargrease in the 1980s and '90s.
Then she met someone who needed help with their dogs and kennel and that's how LaPlante and husband Dave Mills got into dog handling and mushing. They found pretty quickly that LaPlante enjoyed mushing more, while Mills enjoyed the role of dog handler.
Unlike when her hero, Susan Butcher, was competing, LaPlante competes against a lot of other women - and men - of all ages. At least half of the mushers in the Beargrease 120 were women.
"There are a lot of women now, not in the 1980s or '70s," said LaPlante. "And we all compete against each other. There are no male versus female divisions, no age categories. I've competed against 15-year-old boys, and I'm being beaten all the time by a 60-some-year-old woman, Martha Schouweiler, who won (the Beargrease 120) four years in row and came in second this year."
Seemingly to illustrate that point, a husband and wife mushing duo, Blake and Jennifer Freking, finished in first and second place in this year's 293-mile-long John Beargrease Sled Marathon on Tuesday.
LaPlante said she's already looking forward to next year's race, because there were a number of young, first-time dogs on this year's team (a mix of dogs owned by Dave Gordon and LaPlante/Mills) that were exceptional, so she can't wait to see how they do with more experience.
Mother and daughter team
While LaPlante has been running dogs for nine years, Ingram-Diver has been training dogs for 25 years.
Unlike LaPlante, Ingram-Diver said she enjoys handling dogs more than she likes racing, adding that most years her daughter, Billie Diver, will be the musher and let her mom handle the dogs.
"At age 8 she helped me handle one of the long Beargrease teams," Ingram-Diver said. "I'd pull her out of school, much to her teacher's dismay, and take her out on the trail for three days."
She didn't need to convince her daughter to come along either. After winning her first race at age 7, young Diver was hooked. However, this year Billie is pregnant.
"We trained heavily this fall, so I figured somebody's got to run this," said Ingram-Diver.
The cold was not a problem, although Sunday was practically balmy compared to Wednesday and Thursday mornings when the windchill dropped to minus-60 degrees.
"When we took off it was minus-9. I was a little worried about tolerating the cold but it was really not bad. Running up the hills and steering the sled takes a lot of energy," Ingram-Diver said, explaining that she would hop off and run up the steepest hills. "It would be unfair to expect the dogs to pull me all the way - I've got to do my part."
She was also dressed for it. Ingram-Diver said she wears a double base layer, then a heavy wool layer, then a down layer, then a heavy canvas windbreaker "with a really wonderful hood that can protect you from any wind." On her hands, she uses regular thin fleece gloves with hand warmers in them, then heavy-duty mitts like snowmobile mitts, with hand warmers in those. For her feet she wears boots made by Empire Wool and Canvas Company in Duluth, with a thicker sole than mukluks, another popular choice for mushers.
The dogs also wear booties made especially for sled dog racing, to prevent ice balls from building up between the pads of their feet.
A retired psychology professor, Ingram-Diver said there is definitely a mental component to sled dog racing for a musher.
"I think half of it is keeping your head positive, staying in the moment instead of worrying about the next hill or next corner," she said. "It's very mindful in a way."
In her musher profile, Ingram-Diver mentioned that it might be their last year of racing. On the phone, she said that is probably unlikely. Even though they're not breeding any new pups, they still have 14 working dogs between her and Billie and a couple friends.
And then there's little Brynn, Billie's 2-year-old daughter. She loves going out on the sled.
"Brynn says, 'Let's go see the dogs' but what she means is, 'Let's hook them up and go for a ride,'" said her proud grandmother. "I wouldn't be surprised if there's an up-and-coming musher there."
