When it comes to tackling a challenge like the 1,500-mile Cain’s Quest endurance snowmobile race there is no such thing as being too prepared.
It takes months of marathon sessions in garages upgrading suspensions and boosting power on sleds; studying maps and computer models and organizing a thousand logistical details.
The five teams from Maine in this year’s race had everything in place when they drove to the start line in Labrador City, Labrador.
Everything they could control, that is.
“The weather, yeah, it was terrible this year,” Rob Gardner, half of the winning Team Maine Team 22, said.
Cain’s Quest is billed as the longest endurance snowmobile race in Canada. There is no groomed trail, instead racers use GPS equipment to navigate a course through more than a dozen checkpoints over 1,500 miles beginning and ending in Labrador City.
Third place went to Team 31, Eric Hall of Jackman and Tim Lessard of Monmouth, who won the race in 2009.
Also racing from Team Maine were Mike Perrino of Freeport and Peter Ouellette of Portland who came in sixth, in addition to the teams of Russ Griffin of Jackman with Bill Coppersmith of Windham; Tom Farley and Skip Heals of Rockport who all scratched on the trail.
“It was raining at the start line,” Rich Knipping, Gardner’s Team 22 race partner, said. “By the time we left the first checkpoint the weather had changed to snow and wind. Visibility became just about zero and the closer we got to Shefferville we were navigating by GPS in total whiteout conditions.”
Knipping and Gardner pulled into Shefferville in third place and left in the company of three other teams.
“Four of us [teams] traveling together leaving Shefferville gave us some confidence,” he said. “I was not pulling a sled so I was breaking trail. At first it was through a foot of snow and as we got closer to the next checkpoint it was closer to three feet of snow.”
At the same time the winds picked up to about 40-miles-per-hour as temperatures fell below zero.
“It was an absolute blizzard, the drifts were really deep and visibility was zero,” Knipping said. “We got stuck a ton [and] even going downhill we were getting stuck with snow over the windshields and we couldn’t see because the snowmobiles’ headlights were under the snow.”
After more than 35 hours of riding, the team arrived in Kuujjuaq for a mandatory 18-hour rest.
“Those 18 hours came pretty quick,” Knipping said. Then we fueled the sleds and off we went, and that was the start of the longest day of my life.”
For the next 56 hours the team fought its way through massive snowdrifts, over ice-jammed rivers and slush-covered lakes.
At one point, Knipping said, they found themselves in terrain that was simply impassable — and that’s saying a lot for men who think nothing of using ropes and sleds to lower another sled down frozen waterfalls just to keep going.
“We were pulling skis, getting stuck, digging out, getting stuck,” Knipping said. “Within an hour a half-dozen teams were with us bottlenecked in that spot.”
Knipping and Gardner decided to turn around and back track to find a better route to the next check point at Twin Rivers where they grabbed a bite to eat before heading back out.
Exhaustion caught up with them 30 miles later and they decided to join several other teams who had built a fire alongside the trail and rest as best they could in the sub-zero temperatures.
Knipping said they made the run to Churchill Falls — the final rest stop before the finish — as hard as they could when near-disaster struck.
“I had not been following too closely behind Rob because of the snow his sled was kicking up [and] I came around a corner in the trail and saw his helmet lying there,” Knipping said. “I went to go pick it up and I was just hoping his head was not in it.”
It turned out that Gardner had hit a large snowdrift that launched him off of his snowmobile.
“It was a pretty good wipeout,” Gardner said. “It just about took us out of the race, I was definitely rattled and glad it only happened 20 or 30 miles from the layover.”
Safely into Churchill Falls the duo took their mandatory 12-hour layover and, after Knipping duct taped his damaged windshield to his sled, the two pushed on toward the finish line in Labrador City.
“Things started to slow down,” Knipping said “The snow got really deep. There was a helicopter overhead shooting video that showed us stuck up to our necks in snow.”
Knipping and Gardner worked with Labrador Team 6 — which ultimately placed second — who, he said, had the better sled for breaking trail.
“We helped them and they helped us.” Knipping said. “At times we were using our sleds to push theirs.”
The teams parted company before coming to the final checkpoint and soon after Gardner faced a second near race-ending accident when he dislocated his knee stepping off his snowmobile in deep powder.
“I called out to Rich and told him the race was over,” Gardner said. “I asked him if he could fix it.”
Knipping, who works as a chiropractor, told Gardner to take a few deep breaths then quickly pulled the knee back into place.
“He looked at me, blinked and then said a few swear words,” Knipping said. “Then we high-fived each other and got out of the snow.”
Knipping said adrenalin carried them the remaining miles into Labrador City, especially when they looked over their shoulders and saw the second-place team bearing down on them as they crossed the final lake.
“It was harder than I thought it was going to be,” Lessard said. “It was really rough terrain and we really got no sleep.”
For his Team 31, it was fuel, not accidents that almost ended their run when they did some math and realized they were not going to make it to the next fuel stop with what they had.
“Luckily a team scratched and gave us five gallons,” Lessard said. “We went into fuel economy mode and found a sweet spot at 20 miles-per-hour and rode the next 170 miles at that speed just trying to conserve the fuel and stretch it out.”
All around them, Lessard said, teams were blowing motors, ripping skis on rocks or running out of fuel, forcing them out of the race.
“We really could have won it,” Lessard said. “But near the end we went our own way and got stuck in a brook and wasted time there.”
Hall agreed. “If we had just eliminated one time of getting stuck we would have been really close,” he said. “When we were not getting stuck, we were moving.
According to data generated by the GPS tracking unites, the top teams were reaching speeds of 90 mph over open ground.
“We were even breaking trails at 60-miles-per-hour,” Hall said. “On the lakes we were doing 88, we were not messing around.”
Of the four, only Gardner is committed to running the event next year — and that’s after he completes the 2012 Iron Dog Snowmobile Race taking him over 2,000 miles through Alaska’s wilderness and making him one of only three people to compete in both and, if successful, the only one to do it in the same year.
“The biggest thing people need to realize is you can’t do this without sponsors,” Gardner said. “For us, we could not have done it without Coutts Construction, our flagship sponsor.”
At the same time, Team Maine uses events like Cain’s Quest to generate publicity and funds for Pine Tree Camps.
“Yes, it is all about the challenge,” Gardner said. “But it’s also about giving back to the community.”
