Found this on SPKennel's site, it was posted by one of their commenters. Article is from newsminer.
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New McCabe Creek site rises phoenix-like for Yukon Quest after fire
Joshua Armstrong /
jarmstrong@newsminer.com Feb 15, 2010 (0)
McCABE CREEK, Yukon — A few days after his woodshop, garage and generator room burned down, Jerry Kruse received a positive omen.
A neighbor found an ax that was thought to be lost in the blaze.
“See,” Kruse thought. “They’re coming back already.”
On Sunday, the Yukon quest International Sled Dog Race came back to Kruse’s farm at McCabe Creek. The woodshop is gone, but the open arms are the same.
A quick cut through the Kruses’ land about 30 miles south of Pelly Crossing has always been an opportunity for some coffee, cinnamon rolls and pleasant company for Yukon Quest mushers.
But things were different Sunday as the race reached the farm off the Klondike Highway. Where once stood the building that provided shelter to Quest contenders for more than 15 years, there is a concrete foundation.
The Yukon Quest banner instead flew over a nearly finished garage attached to Kruse’s nearby house, inviting mushers inside.
On Feb. 22, two days after the last musher passed through the farm on the way to Fairbanks last year, the woodshop caught fire and was destroyed along with the garage and generator shack attached to it.
Kruse estimated the damage to be around $100,000 and he lost some invaluable items — tools from his father, who died several years before.
But he also felt relief that the six people in the shed at the time, runners in the Yukon Arctic Ultra and a documentary film crew escaped uninjured.
An outpouring of support came almost immediately. A list of those who donated a piece of the $20,220 to rebuild is pinned to a wall inside the garage.
Hugh Neff — who took second place in 2009’s Quest — donated $5,000, and $580 more came from the Yukon Quest organization and someone listed as “a musher that stopped by.”
Friends, family, mushers and neighbors also gave their time to rebuild the structures by milling lumber, pouring concrete and cleaning up debris.
The foundation for a new shed has been laid and a generator shack is a door and a window away from completion.
Work will resume in spring, a season that Kruse feels begins when Quest racers arrive on his property.
The tradition began during the Yukon Quest’s inaugural run in 1984. Back then, Kruse owned the Midway Lodge across the highway.
On the day the family returned from a winter-long trip to run a trap line, Kruse was told that the Midway Lodge would be a stop on the trail, and it needed to be ready in 60 minutes.
“At 10, they called and said they’ll be there in an hour,” he recalled.
Kathy and the girls immediately fired up the ovens to make bread and cookies, and the family took in more than 30 people that week.
They hosted the dog drop at the lodge until Jerry sold it in 1992. The family then opened the doors of its woodshed on the farm — where they have fields of oats and raise horses, chickens, turkeys, pigs in the summer, the occasional flock of pheasants and a few goats.
On Sunday, mushers headed down the farm’s half-mile driveway, taking a quick right turn away from the old woodshed area and between snow-covered playground structures — signs of a house once full of children.
Kruse and his wife, Kathy, have raised two boys and eight girls while living at the riverside community. They’re almost done with the paperwork to adopt a ninth girl.
Many of those children — all are grown now — come back every year to help run the dog drop, such as Jari Kruse, who was a young girl when the inaugural Quest mushers stopped by in 1984. Now a Whitehorse resident, Jari had 14 dozen cinnamon rolls baked, plastic-wrapped and ready for mushers to grab on the fly.
While checking Internet updates on the Quest and scrolling through photos of the inferno that took their shed, Jari said she loves to hear mushers talk among each other and always looked forward to visits from Pecos Humphries and Sonny Lindner when she was young.
Jerry can’t say why he opens his home every year, even at the worst of times. Journalists ask him this every year, and he still doesn’t have a clear answer.
“It’s the age to retire,” he said. “I don’t know what to do, but it can’t get any better than this.”
Contact staff writer Joshua Armstrong at 459-7523.
All my children have four feet and fur.