i Riders, support crew face different challenges at Cain’s Quest
Morning Sentinel
Riders, support crew face different challenges at Cain’s Quest
BY TRAVIS BARRETT Outdoors Writer Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel 03/04/2009

The sled creeps to a halt in the middle of a frozen lake, its rear suspension hanging loose.

Rich Knipping hops off. What he sees is almost enough to make him cry. Darkness creeps in like a menacing supernatural being from a Stephen King novel. The temperatures fall to nearly 30 degrees below zero, a wind picking up to provide a "feels like" number that would make most TV weatherman gasp in horror.

The scenario approaches the worst Cain's Quest has to offer. Two-man snowmobile teams leave Labrador City, Newfoundland, each March and race more than 1,000 miles over five days on unbroken terrain, led only by GPS coordinates that lead from checkpoint to checkpoint. Each team's support crew is charged with locating and delivering food and supplies, though essentially the riders are on their own.

Which was how Knipping, in his day job as a chiropractor in Monmouth, felt when teammate Rob Gardner pulled alongside and the two stared at his battered sled.

In his two tries at the impossible Cain's Quest, Knipping was the closest he'd been to wanting to give up. But after an hour and a half, and without being able to feel their own hands that performed the work, Knipping and Gardner, who is from Mercer, used a strap to literally tie the suspension into place long enough to nurse the snowmobile to the next checkpoint, 10 miles away.

"I feel as though there's a lot of challenges," said Knipping, who joins Gardner on Team Maine for a third straight attempt at the Quest, which begins March 14. "One is the emotional toll it takes -- do you have the ability to keep going when you've got nothing left to give? The weather can be outrageous . Last year, it was 51 below Fahrenheit on the last day of the race. You have to be able to fix your snowmobile in middle of nowhere.

"The last two years, we had to sleep out for a night. Not everybody would be real anxious to do that there when it's 30 below."

On that lake, on a satellite phone, Knipping and Gardner's crackled voices let the support crew know what they were going to need when they arrived.

• • •

In the middle of the night, Dana Blackstone convinces the owner of a small Ski-Doo dealership to unlock his doors.

"I was in the back room at that Ski-Doo dealership when it was closed," Blackstone said, recalling his role in repairing that rear suspension. "The owner came in, and we had to get creative and fast. I'm literally pulling things off the shelf and writing down the parts numbers for the owner so I could go back and pay him in the morning.

"But we needed to get a piece fabricated, and we had to find the right place to be able to get it done. And then it's got to get hauled out to the team, so they can get it and fix the sleds."

Finding those places by vehicle can be more difficult than completing the course via snowmobile.

The loop from Labrador City to Goose Bay is an approximately 500-mile ride with one road and one snowmobile trail -- which, Knipping says, hasn't been groomed in years. There are entire towns housed under one roof.

"Fermont, Quebec, is the last city in Quebec, right before you get to Lab City," Knipping said. "It's literally one whole town in one building -- the store, the school, the library, the strip club, the mall, everything. Unless you've seen it, you can't understand it. It looks like a Wal-Mart distribution center, and it's all there."

Suffice it to say, finding supplies and getting around from checkpoint to checkpoint, for the support staff, isn't easy. It's not like a trip down Western Avenue in Augusta -- where if one gas station is closed you simply move on to the next.

There may not be a next. And the one you did find may not open again for hours.

"The biggest challenge for us is we go up there, and we don't necessarily have all the ins and outs because we're not from there," said Blackstone, Team Maine's manager, who cannot make the trip this time.

"It's like when we show up in Goose Bay, where's the Ski-Doo dealership? Where can you get parts fabricated if you need something? Where are you getting diesel for the truck? Or propane for the tanks in the trailer? What time do the gas stations close? If you need to leave at 5 a.m. to meet the team somewhere, you don't have time to wait until 7:30 for them to open. So, what do you do?"

You play nicey-nice. "It's crazy some of the stuff you have to get creative on," Blackstone said. "But you try to find the right people and be polite and not be a jerk about it. If you are, you'll never get anything you need."

• • •

So, who's got the tougher task?

The riders? They're facing double-digit sub-zero temperatures, trying to fix their own snowmobiles and sleeping out in the wilderness.

The support staff? They log hundreds of miles driving in a truck, sleeping hardly at all for five days, chasing supplies so riders can make necessary fixes.

"It's probably the support crew guys," Knipping said. "Those guys -- we're sending those guys all over the place at all hours of the night. And they haven't always had the advantage of being up there before and knowing where to go."

"It's the same thing for every team, but for us, it's about always trying to do things that are one step ahead of what other teams are doing," Blackstone said. "The biggest thing is making sure that you have everything in order and everything the riders needed when you meet them at a check point or one of mandatory off-the-clock times. You get the list of what they're going to need when they wake up five hours later, everything they'll need to fix sleds, change out batteries, everything."

Still, both sides get asked the same questions, over and over.

"You can't prepare for it unless you've been there," Knipping said. "What am I doing out here? That question comes along a lot."

Travis Barrett -- 621-5648

tbarrett@centralmaine.com

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