Behind the Lens at the CB300
Whitney McLaren shooting on the trail. Photo by Cat Strader.
By Michelle McAfee
Whitney McLaren stomps through knee-deep snow on an old road that doglegs from the main Copper Basin 300 sled dog trail. It’s a clear and balmy -15 degrees F day as the sun rises above the Copper Basin. McLaren sets her black camera bag down in the fluffy white snow and pulls out a Nikon D810, her lead camera. She gets a reading on the light and the different angles from her perch and waits in the quiet of morning until movement on the hill above her catches her eye.
In seconds, the camera is pressed to her face as McLaren drops her finger onto the shutter button. The sled dog team crests the hill and picks up speed, heading directly toward her. Behind the lens, McLaren sees multi-second snapshots of the sled dogs closing in the space, getting larger and closer in the viewfinder, and when it appears they might overtake her, the team abruptly turns and follows the packed trail around the bend as the camera clicks, clicks, clicks a shot of the musher’s back draped in a pumpkin orange parka lined with wolf fur.
McLaren has been photo-documenting the CB300 since 2015. Based in Fairbanks - Two-Rivers - she was following a local musher, Ryne Olson, closely then, along with Kristin Pace and Mike Ellis, for a photo project on the Yukon Quest with another photographer. On a whim, she drove down to Glennallen for the CB300 that year, camped in a Subaru in The Hub parking lot, and followed the race as a newbie.
Nicholas Petit on the CB300 Trail. Photo by Whitney McLaren.
McLaren got very involved with the Yukon Quest after that and didn’t photograph the CB300 again until 2020. Jason Severs, President of the Board of Directors for the CB300 race, was a judge on the Yukon Quest, and McLaren got to know him and CB300 Vice President Donna Russell Swope through her work on that race. They reached out to McLaren and asked if she would photograph the Copper Basin race. “It was kind of branching out from the Yukon Quest, which was the main race I worked. After Jason asked me to come to Copper Basin, I thought, ‘Well, I can go to other races too,’ and it kind of built from there,” said McLaren.
Photography came first before mushing, said Montana-born McLaren, “I have a lot of photographers in my family. My grandpa always had a camera. My mom took all my senior photos and my siblings’ senior photos on film. And two of my brothers are also into photography. One is a professional photographer in the Lower 48. My younger brother kind of got me back into photography.”
Her brother upgraded his equipment in 2013, so McLaren bought his Nikon D5200s. A year later, she adopted the two huskies that later camped with McLaren and her wife in the Subaru at The Hub during her first CB300.
Dogs bedded down at the Sourdough Checkpoint at the CB300. Photo by Whitney McLaren.
McLaren laughed and said, “[My wife] went down there with me and thought I was crazy, but she stuck around. We now have nine huskies, but my two first huskies were my initial introduction to mushing life.”
After adopting huskies, McLaren wanted to learn to mush. She met a man who was running a nonprofit in Fairbanks teaching at-risk youth and kids with disabilities how to mush. He also worked with Veterans, taking them on mushing trips. He needed pictures for his website, and McLaren was a photographer, so she learned the ins and outs of mushing and got to take photos of mushing trips in the Fairbanks area.
McLaren then went to work for a camera store in Fairbanks, which helped improve her knowledge of all things cameras. She upgraded to Nikon D810s and invested in different lenses. “The best camera is the one you’ve got with you,” said McLaren, “My brothers’ cameras were a good intro into DSLRs.”
Frozen Gear on the Kobuk 440 Trail. Photo by Whitney McLaren.
The rigors of shooting in frigid temperatures demand a lot from the gear. McLaren has learned techniques that keep her cameras and lenses from collecting moisture or fogging up in the field. One simple technique to keep the eye cup from fogging up is controlling her breathing. When the camera is against McLaren’s face, she pushes her exhale away from the camera instead of next to it. This keeps the ice cup from icing up. Switching to a plastic eye cup instead of glass also helped with the fogging/icing issue.
Once McLaren’s camera has been outside for an hour - sometimes in - 50 below F temperatures - it has to be slowly warmed up for at least an hour before the camera can be used indoors. “When it’s 50 below, we’re looking at a 100 or 110 or more degree difference between outside and inside. Once the camera has been outside in those temperatures, I usually don’t take it inside,” said McLaren.
She often drives her truck to shooting locations along the trail accessible by road. Not running the heater and keeping her photography gear in the backseat helps give some protection to the equipment without warming it too much. Most camera websites will advise not using digital DSLRs below 30 degrees F. McLaren has to push the gear hard to get the shots.
Whitney McLaren with her dogs Sitka and Archie. Photo by Cat Strader.
Sometimes the equipment gets cranky, said McLaren, “I have had cameras slow down, and the shutter curtain squeaks. The camera continues to work, but the lenses have lubrication in them, similar to different parts in your vehicle. That can gel up and get solid, making it difficult to push the zoom, and sometimes the focus of the camera doesn’t want to react quite as fast. There are ways to mitigate that - sticking with one focal length throughout the shot.”
McLaren described instances where she rode a snow machine in - 50 below for a long time and had the camera in a bag on her back. When she set up at the spot where the musher came by, her camera went “crckk,crckk,” low battery. “I got nothing. I was like, ‘Great, I just froze to come say Hi,’” said McLaren, laughing at the situation.
The batteries are what she worries about the most with her work. McLaren carries ten of them and tries to carry a backup camera setup in case her lead camera fogs or freezes up. But sometimes, the most careful planning isn’t enough.
Tietje Paveglio leads her dad Matt Paveglio to his parking space at the Sourdough Checkpoint during the Copper Basin 300. Photo by Whitney McLaren.
Working on the Kobuk 440 in 2020, McLaren was riding a snow machine to a location on the race trail. Her camera bag, loaded with gear, was lashed on the back of the machine. The bag fell off without her knowing but remained connected to the speeding machine. It was dragging, bumping, and jerking around behind the snowmachine for an unknown amount of miles as McLaren drove down the trail on the Kobuk. When she arrived at the shooting location, she opened the frozen, snow-packed camera bag, and the first thing she did was take a picture of the carnage.
“I looked in the camera bag, and the lens and camera had disconnected themselves. There was snow in the bag, on the back of the lens, and in the camera body where the lens connects. I was like, ‘Uhhhh, how do I not just cry right now.’ But the race was still happening,” said McLaren.
On that same race, at a different location, multiple zippers worked their way undone, and in the swaying back and forth of her backpack, her computer fell into the snow somewhere. McLaren found everything that was in her bag, including papers in the same sleeve as the laptop, but she never found the computer. It’s on the Kobuk River, up by Onion Portage somewhere. A strange find for someone fishing up there this summer.
Elke Hall as she passes through Gakona in the 2024 CB300, her first time running the race. Elke went on to finish 13th and receive the Vets Choice award for exemplary dog care. Photo by Whitney McLaren.
McLaren is also an archaeologist in Fairbanks in the summer, but her main winter seasonal work is photographing sled dog races. The CB300 team helps McLaren with gas and finds her a place to stay, but it’s the mushers and fans buying her photos that allow her to continue to do this work.
Her website offers options to buy photos or sponsor McLaren by buying her a coffee, helping with a snow machine ride, a tank of gas, or a plane ticket. You can view more of Whitney McLaren’s photography at mushingphotos.com. And if you can, kick her a cup of coffee. She’s earned it.