A Thunder Bay man celebrated a milestone birthday—his 60th—far from home and well into the second leg of a marathon snowmobiling expedition from Maine to Alaska.
Along the way, Hugh Cummins was raising money for diabetes research.
Cummins returned to Thunder Bay Bay on Saturday from Fairbanks, Alaska after finishing an 8,000-kilometre-long trip that spanned two years.
He was part of a 10-member team from Canada and the U.S. who rode their machines from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan to Fairbanks, finishing the fundraising expedition that saw them ride from Maine to Michigan last year.
Cummins says he will always remember the way the group was treated by strangers they encountered during the trip.
"I'm really proud of the people that we ran into. What absolutely floored me was the openness of the people across the prairie provinces. When we rode to a restaurant we'd go in and buy lunch and maybe spend a couple of hundred dollars, then the restaurant owner would hand us a cheque for maybe a hundred dollars," Cummins recalled in an interview Monday with Tbnewswatch.
"Or we'd buy gas at a gas station and, after paying, the owner would come out and put 50 dollars in our pockets."
Cummins said that in one community they were greeted by a young boy with juvenile diabetes who showed up at lunch so he could meet the team and donate thirty dollars to the cause.
"These were people that we knew nothing about, that were inspired by what we were doing, or just so happy that we were raising awareness, that they wanted to say 'thanks for giving back.' Those are the people that I really want to thank for supporting a cause that's dear to me."
One of the reasons Cummins supports diabetes research is that such a large percentage of northerners, especially Indigenous people, suffers from the disease.
None of the donations the group received will go toward their expenses, he said. "We pay for our own trip. They're our snowmobiles, our gas, our food, our lodging."
The snowmobilers, for the most part, used groomed trails during the journey and were careful to maintain a "safety first" attitude throughout.
One of the highlights was following the route of February's Yukon Quest sled dog race between Whitehorse and Fairbanks.
"We requested that they leave the stakes in for the route that marks that trail. We hired local guides for that section so we could use their expertise," Cummins said.
He described himself as "an infant" in this kind of snowmobiling.
"Seven years ago I ran into a guy who talked about doing 7,000 or 8,000 kilometres in a year and I looked at him, I think, as if he had horns coming out of his head. I was just used to going along a bumpy northern Ontario trail to go ice-fishing."
Cummins, who plans to retire from the workforce this year, expects to take part in more adventures next year and in the years ahead.
He's left his machine in Alaska, and hopes at some point to join several of the team members on a ride from Fairbanks to Nome, on the Bering Sea. "Then we can say we rode coast-to-coast, from Maine to Nome."
Donations to Diabetes Canada can be made through the website MichCanSka.com, or by emailing Cummins at hughcummins@shaw.ca.
