Off The Beaten Path Weather Report, 7:30 a.m: 0 degrees, 65% humidity, hazy, calm winds.

I took another day off of work today to help Mark get all the gear back home after the Boundary Waters dog team shuttling for the winter camping crew out of Voyageuer. We ran the two teams home in front of snomobiles last night pulling into the yard sometime around 6:00. Today we have to haul up five dog sleds and other miscellaneous gear before Mark takes me back to my truck so I can finally go back to work tomorrow.

The reason I took the extra day off is our friend Mike Dvorak, who helped haul the guys in and out, had to get back to the big city for work today. Also, yesterday was Nate’s last day with us as he has to report back to work in the Grand Canyon next week. It is now just Mark and I and the dogs Off The Beaten Path. We have to thank Nate for being so accomodating over this weekend and for all his help. When we came home on Saturday, the cabin had been vacuumed, there was fresh kindling in the woodbox and all the water buckets were full along with all the chores that were done in the days that we were gone. Thank you Nate for all your work this winter. We appreciate all the work you did and learned a lot from you. Thank You Nate and Gus, we’ll miss having you around.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you all about the Boundary Waters adventure and why the five guys went to Ottertrack Lake. There is something big that goes along with it, and I didn’t want to jinx the experience by letting the cat out of the bag until they were all safely back in civilization. The guys, our dogs and most of our gear made it back out fairly unscathed. We have some sore feet from the icy trail yesterday (thanks to the rain on Sunday night), a broken stantion on my basket sled and a broken track on Mark’s sled…not bad, could have been mush worse!

Time to run. Have a great Tuesday.

Daylight Watch: Tommorrow will be 3 minutes and 26 seconds longer than today!!!