Signal Mountain’s Jim Bardoner placed 11th in the Race to the Sky dog sledding race in Montana, crossing the finish line at 5:10 a.m. EST Wednesday
. He finished 14 hours, 7 minutes behind race-winner Rick Larson, but the showing qualified Bardoner, an Erlanger doctor, for the 2011 Iditarod in Alaska.
“The sled made it also, but not before a head-on collision with a tree,” Bardoner wrote in an e-mail, “that slowed me way down the first day. I had to do a makeshift repair … so I could move away from the blind curve at the bottom of a steep hill.
I limped along to a wider section where I could fix it properly. I escaped with a bloody nose and a bruised hand. So the sled held up.”