Ever dream of running one of the toughest races in the world? Well, Mike Ellis did.  Mike didn't just run it, he ran it with an AKC registered All Siberian Husky team. He finished the race with a record breaking run, completing the race in 11th place with the fastest time for an all purebred Siberian Husky team. The Yukon Quest is a race of relationship between dog and man. Held in the Alaskan wilderness, Mike ran it with welcome abandon and fierce determination. For 12 days, 9 hours and 58 minutes, Mike Ellis and his team have endured sleep deprivation, frostbite, gale force winds, blinding storms, overflows and glaring ice. This is their story.

Mike, let me start by saying, Congratulations to you and your team.

The Yukon Quest is a 1000 mile race of which only the strong survive. Knowing that, what made you decide to run it with an all purebred Siberian team that is bred for endurance, not speed?

Well, I think it is the perfect match actually. What made me run it? I am not sure I know the answer to that except that it has been my dream since I first started mushing. The Quest has kinda of been my dream.

I understand, you and your wife Sue gave up a lot to run this race?

She gave up just as much as I did. We mortgaged our house. Both quit our jobs, and she is a rather career oriented person, so that was certainly a difficult for her to do.  She has done almost half the training and is a huge part of the team.

Once you made the commitment to run the race, how did you recognize talent in your Siberians and how did you help them to reach their potential so they could finish the race?

We only have a very small kennel. It had been only 18 dogs for a long time and then we had a couple of litters specifically for the Quest. We don't go through many dogs, we try very hard to get the very best out of the few that we have. How do we do that? I guess it's time and training. We have been full time mushers since we came up here (Whitehorse, Yukon) in October and that made a big difference. We had the whole winter to put towards the dogs without other distractions. That was a major difference in
achieving the potential of the team.

Who were your lead dogs?

Stump is my "A" #1 lead dog. He probably led between 800-900 miles of the race and
all of the tough miles. A couple of young dogs really stood up for me, Wilson before he
was dropped in Circle, had led us up over Eagle Summit and down the other side with
Stump and a lot of miles into Circle through the real cold. It was minus 60 degrees.
Then another young dog, Reba, really stepped up and led probably the last 400 miles of
the race or so.

Let's go through the checkpoints.

Fairbanks to Chena Hot Springs which is 99 miles and going from an elevation of 440
feet to 1550 feet.

We knew we were going to put them in the truck when we got to Chena Hot Springs and
I have regularly done 80 and 90 mile training runs in the hills this winter. This first leg is
a short hundred miles of river running and relatively flat woods trails. I knew it was
going to be a fairly easy leg. Once we found out they were going to get a big, long rest
and a truck ride around Rosebud Summit when we got to Chena, I decided to run that
leg straight with short stops every two hours.

Central
77 miles
elevation of 935 feet

That actually got cut short because we left from 101 the next day. That is the
climb over Eagle Summit that has the big drop which has a lot of mushers not
wanting to come to do the Yukon Quest because of it. It's such a feared decent.
But the snow was good there and I still had a 14 dog team and we coasted right
down it. I slid down on the runners. I guess it was just beginners luck, but veteran
Michele Phillips was at the bottom and she thought that was the right way to do
 it. She came down on her side and didn't have so much fun.

Circle City
74 miles at 597 feet

Circle was the end of the cold we'd been in since the start. The warmest we had seen
was about 20 below and the coldest was about 60 below along Birch Creek. And by the
time we got to Circle it had warmed up to 20 below and that felt balmy. I had to drop
Wilson with a sore shoulder and turned around after going out 12 miles to bring
Hawkeye back to drop him. That cost us 12 plus hours of time because it added a
whole other run/rest cycle.

Eagle
159 miles at an elevation of 880 feet.

That's the big section of 150 miles on the Yukon River between Circle and Eagle. The
jumble ice was just incredible there. It was incredibly hard on dogs. This is the
checkpoint where the majority of the dogs in the race were dropped or injuries were
sustained which led them to be dropped farther down the trail. The jumble ice was
incredibly rough. There were long sections of glare ice and 20 mile sections of the
roughest jumble ice they said they had seen in 25 years. That was incredibly difficult.
Those were the hardest miles of the of the race by far and forced me to drop Romeo
and Lotus with front-end injuries.

Dawson City
147 miles at 1050 feet

Dawson was awesome! My handling crew was incredible there. They had
a camp set up for the dogs that made the team feel like they were in heaven.
That's just what you want at your 36 hour layover where the handlers can assist.
I, personally, was sick as a dog. I had a fever and had been vomiting off the
sled the last hundred miles since the start of the Forty Mile River. I was feeling
horrible. Luckily, the handlers were able to step in and do a great job with the
team and get them ready to roll out of there.

How were you able to get yourself together to get back in the race?

Well, we were in the middle of a race and how I felt just really didn't matter that much. I had to overcome that and not let the dogs know I was sick and keep taking care of them so they would keep taking care of me.

Pelly Crossing
201 miles at an elevation of 1558 feet

You start climbing almost immediately right out of Dawson and of course you are loaded for 200
miles of camping out in the wilderness. Two big hills. You go up about 25 miles to up the top of
King Solomons Dome and you get up there and it's beautiful, it's gorgeous looking! We had a gray day but enough to see out. Then the climbs through the Black Hills are almost as tough as the dome. It warmed considerably here and we had to sit out the majority of the daylight hours, waiting for it to cool back down.

Carmacks Elevation
73 miles
1722 ft

At Carmacks itself, I got a good rest...8 hours. We kind of missed Pelly. The area
from Pelly to McCabe, we had one of the fastest runs in the race. And this was after
700 miles. I think our time was second or third fastest in the whole race. We were
running competitive race times with the leaders. That is very rewarding. I was
taking more rests, granted, but our run times were right up there with the
Lance Mackey's and the Ken Anderson's of the world.

Weren't you going about 7.5 mph?

You're actually moving much faster than that because that accounts all your rest stops,
all your bootie stops, dealing with injuries on the trail, overflows on the trail, etc. So
your actual moving speed is considerably higher than what shows up, checkpoint to
checkpoint, especially on the long legs where you are camping.

Braeburn
77 miles
2326 ft.

I heard there was some overflow? Was it difficult?

Well, I am 6'4" and it was almost to my waist by the time we got there. The dogs could not even come close to touching the bottom. That was a difficult thing. It wasn't terribly cold but when you are to the soaked waist, it's pretty cold at close to 20 degrees.

Did you walk the Siberians around the overflow like Lance Mackey and Ken Andersen did?

Apparently, the ice wasn't as broken out there when they went through. By the time I was there, so many teams had been through, there was no way get around. We went straight through it.

Whitehorse
FINISH LINE
100 miles
2089 feet

What was it like reaching the finish line?

I can honestly say, it came to soon. I wasn't prepared. I was ready to stop and camp
with five miles to the finish line just to make it last a little longer. I wasn't ready for the
finish.

Really! You would think that the knowing the finish was near, it would be the longest leg of the race because you couldn't wait to get there.

Well, it had gotten real warm that day and I had stopped to camp for three and a half hours. That's not alot of rest in 100 miles. But, by this time in the race, it's a pretty hardy dog team that can pull off 100 mile legs with relatively short rests.

At this time you were in 10th place when another musher passed you.

That's right! Bill Pinkham went by me while I was stopped with the dogs. I was actually barefoot, next to the fire, drying out my boots and gear from going through the overflow.

In retrospect, what was the toughest part of the race?

I would say easily the Yukon River. That was mentally draining for the team. The rough ice, the glare ice, the wide open sections with the wind blowing, where there is no discernable trail. Even if a team is five minutes in front of you, the wind was blowing so hard, straight in your face, that the trail is gone. And the markers were pretty sparse so it wasn't mentally reassuring. Those Yukon River miles were tough.

Did you ever experience any of the following: Sleep deprivation, frostbite,
hallucinations?

Yea. I still have some numb toes and they tell me they may be numb for 6 months or so. That minus 60 was pretty rough. I definitely fell asleep on the sled more than once.  I'll tell you a little story, that's kind of funny... On the lakes in between Pelly and Carmacks, no... between Carmacks and Braeburn. I literally fell off the sled and hit the ground, woke up, and looked up when I hit the ground and all ten sets of eyes were looking back at me. The whole team just stopped dead as soon as I fell off and was saying "Time to go Dad, get up!". I was pretty impressed because it was on a lake and they could have kept going.

At your darkest moment, was there ever a time that you wanted to quit?

I was pretty shell shocked coming into Circle. The extreme cold had kind of beat me up.  I was cold and I knew my toes were frozen. I was close to quitting there. I knew I wasn't going to, but I remember I walked in and said to Sue "I am 30 seconds away from quitting" and she said "No, you're 30 seconds from a nap".

Do you feel that genetics play a large roll in building a good sled team?

Oh sure, it's where you start from. Without that, it's really hard to have a great team. You can make over-achievers and I like to think my team has a group of over-achievers.  But at some point you are limited by your genetics. I think that having the best dogs and breeding to the best dogs is critical.

Structurally, as a sled dog, what do you look for in your dogs?

I am looking for a longer, leaner dog that has reach, with attitude. I am sold on attitude.  I want my dogs to be dying to go. That's what they do, that's what they live to do. It's not that I am ever making them run. I am allowing them to go out and do what they love to do.

The Siberians you chose to run the race with, are they your bloodlines?

Well we have only bred three litters in our life. There are dogs that carry the Tsuga name but it's hard to say that they are a distinct bloodline at this point, however we may work towards that. Initially, we got two puppies from George and Ann Cook in New Hampshire, which is where I first started working with Siberians in the fall of 1993.  We have since bred the Siberians we got from them and introduced a fairly pure Kodiak strain which is now the core of this team.

Have you ever considered running with Alaskan Huskies?

No. No. We stay in Sibs because we love the Sibs. We don't show. We don't do breed specific things. We run our dogs and we love our dogs. It's the Siberian that we love.  We aren't interested in running Alaskans. I've worked for Alaskan kennels and have alot of great friends that run Alaskans. But the Siberian is suited for us and we are suited for it.

I understand you have set a new record for the Yukon Quest.

To the best of my knowledge, Peter Thomman was the fastest time in 1991. I believe we are now the fastest time with an AKC registered Siberian Husky Team. We did put them in the truck around Rosebud Summit, but that actually made our race longer, not shorter.

Any plans to run the Yukon Quest again or maybe take on the Iditarod?

I can't say that there are plans yet. We've certainly been talking about it and if we are talking about it already...who knows. It's a very expensive proposition and it was very difficult for us to pull it off once. I don't know if we could make it work again.

How are all the team members now? (A week after the finish.)

All fourteen of the team have been out running and are healed up and ready for action!  We're heading back up to Alaska to run a couple shorter races (Chatanika 200 and Taiga 300) this spring with them before heading back to NH in April.

That's good to hear!  Thank you for the interview.  We greatly appeciate that you would share this incrediable journey with us.

To read more about Mike Ellis and learn more about his team.  Visit Mike and his wife Sue at Tsuga Siberians.

All Rights Reserved.  Photos are the property of Mike and Sue Ellis of Tsuga Siberians.  Reproduction of photos are prohibited without permission.  The interview is the property of Siberians USA and may not be reproduced without prior permission.

Mike Ellis at Startline with Mugs and Stump in the lead
Post Race with Stump and Hawkeye in the lead