It was about minus 40 below now and as he edged down the bank at Isaac's Point he could feel the wind building in strength. The Eskimo had been right: this was no time to be out over water. The ice he had crossed a day earlier had already broken up and around him he saw cakes of ice threatening to come loose. The cracks seemed to be getting closer, and in some places open water was just a few feet away. Water spurted up through cracks and the ice heaved. Togo zigzagged around the weak spots and several times put on a burst of speed toward shore. At times, blizzard conditions obscured Seppala's vision. Once the last bay had been crossed, the team turned toward the mainland, putting the ice floes behind them, and Seppala breathed a little easier.
A few hours later, the entire section of ice over which they had come broke up in chunks and blew out to sea.
Once firmly on shore, Seppala stopped the team and rubbed the dogs down, brushing off a layer of ice and snow that had formed over their faces, drying off their paws, and tending to any cuts on their feet. Although the most dangerous part of the run was behind them, the most physically challenging part was just starting. They would have to climb a series of ridges to the 1,200-foot summit of Little McKinley, which overlooks Golovin Bay.
Many mushers consider that climb to be the toughest part of the trail to Nome. The exposed ridges stretch out over eight miles. The downgrades are steep and the dogs and drivers have little time to recover from one ridge before they have to breathe in deep and charge up the next. By the time the summit of Little McKinley is reached, the teams have climbed about 5,000 feet. Seppala's dogs were being asked to make the climb with less than five hours of rest, and after they had traveled for four and a half days and covered 260 miles of trail. With few reserves to call on, the team began to stumble from exhaustion. But they did not stop, and strained up the final ascent, then raced three miles down to Dexter's roadhouse in Golovin.
Some thirteen hours after the start at Isaac's Point, Seppala's team arrived at its destination and passed the serum to Charlie Olson. It had been a seamless effort. Since Seppala had picked up the serum from Ivanoff on the shore ice of Norton Sound, he and his dogs had traveled 135 miles, more than two and a half times the distance covered by any of the other drivers. And this was done at top speed, in blizzard conditions over heaving ice. He and the dogs had survived the ruthless challenge of Norton Sound and saved at least a day off the critical time schedule. Looking at them, you would never know. All they needed was a rest. It was a testament to Seppala's training, conditioning, and skills on the trail.
The time was a little before 3:00 p.m. Now, all that stood between Golovin and Nome was the final stretch of seventy-eight miles.
The storm was making itself felt beyond Golovin. On the same day, a Sunday, Nome awoke to the sound of the wind rising. It had been nearly two weeks since Billy Barnett's death. The streets were empty; not a single parishioner was headed up to Sunday mass and there were no children skating out on the Snake River. Earlier in the week, some boys had been allowed out to throw snowballs at each other, albeit at a safe distance. Now even they had retreated to the safety of their cabins. Loose boards began to rattle, and snow pellets blew against the walls with a pock, pock sound that grew in volume and intensity.
Out on the Sandspit, Nurse Morgan struggled against the wind, visiting as many families as possible before her vision became obscured by the blowing snow and the cold became unbearable. Since the death of Bessie Stanley, the first Eskimo to die from diphtheria, the Sandspit had been under a strict lockdown enforced by teachers from the government-run Native School. They patrolled the streets to make sure the quarantine was obeyed and that every household had enough food, coal, and water to last through the storm.
Across town, Dr. Welch went through the medical reports, visited patients, and did what he could to keep up with the number of victims. Another case had been identified and Welch made a frightening observation. There were twenty-eight cases in Nome now, and "even if the dogs manage to arrive with the supply there will be sufficient antitoxin to care for only 30 people." He told this to the local United Press reporter Robert McDowell, who was unaware at the time that he, his wife, and infant daughter would soon be added to the list of the ill.
As dire as that sounded, the more serious concern was that the drivers would never make it to Nome. This was already shaping up as an extraordinary blizzard. Even experienced mushers wouldn't want to tempt fate under these conditions. If just one driver in the relay got lost or blown off course by the storm and.could not reach the warmth of a roadhouse, the ampoules of serum would eventually freeze, expand, and crack, thus ruining the supply.
Caught between the need for serum and the possibility that a heroic attempt to mush through the storm could result in the loss of the first shipment, Curtis Welch decided to call a meeting of the Board of Health and ask them to stop the relay. The loss of a few hours or even a few days, he explained, was not as important as the safety of the shipment. Twenty-eight lives were now depending on the antitoxin reaching Nome intact. The health board members agreed.
In an attempt to reach the mushers, Mayor Maynard picked up the phone and requested the operator to put him through to Pete Cur-ran, the roadhouse keeper at Solomon. Maynard told Curran that when Gunnar Kaasen arrived from Bluff with the serum, he should be ordered to remain in Solomon until the storm abated and it was safe to resume travel. A call was also sent out to Port Safety, where Ed Rohn, the last driver in the relay, was informed that the rescue attempt had been temporarily halted.
No one in the room knew if these calls would have any effect: the exact location of the serum was unknown. Because the telephone lines from Nome reached only as far as Solomon and there was no Signal Corps connection with the coast, the last update had been Gonangnan's departure from Unalakleet yesterday morning. It was not even clear whether Gonangnan had met up with Seppala and if Seppala had safely crossed Norton Sound and passed the serum on to Charlie Olson, who was to pass it to Gunnar Kaasen. Kaasen was the penultimate driver in the relay, and he was expected to check in at Solomon before going on to Port Safety.
Still, everyone agreed that putting in the calls had been the right thing to do. Having achieved his goal, Welch walked out into what had become a severe blizzard and made his way over to the Signal Corps station. He had to update Washington on the storm before he too took cover from the winds.
"Violent blizzard now on is delaying progress," he wired his colleagues at the Public Health Service. "Have ordered antitoxin stopped as I wish to take no chances on its freezing or being lost to save a few hours." In a switch from his usual matter-of-fact tone, Welch continued: "Deeply grateful your wire. [A reference to the message Welch had received the day before in which his superiors professed their confidence in his ability to handle the epidemic] A touch of the human heartens a man. Will try to prove that your confidence is not misplaced."
Out at Port Safety, twenty-one miles from Nome, Rohn received the telephone call from Nome. He could not have agreed more with the decision of the health board. From the window of the roadhouse, he could see the ice beyond the lagoon that separated Port Safety from the Bering Sea. It was, as he described it, in "constant motion from a heavy groundswell." Rohn unhooked the dogs, fed them, and put the sled away. Before settling in for a long rest, he telephoned Nome with a message: the wind was blowing 80 miles per hour, "whirling the snow so that it was impossible for man or beast to face the storm..."As the message came through, the connection crackled and the line went dead. Nome lost what little communication it had with the drivers and it could only pray that the message had reached Kaasen.
It would not.
Fifty miles east, on the other side of Cape Nome, Gunnar Kaasen sat in the roadhouse at Bluff. He had no inkling of the meeting in Nome or the decision to hold off the relay. Bluff was a tiny mining village of fewer than forty people, named after the surrounding gray bluffs that towered over the coast. It was situated well east of the telephone lines to Nome.
&nb
sp; Kaasen had arrived at the roadhouse sixteen hours earlier, and at five o'clock on Sunday evening he was still sitting by the glowing iron stove, alert for any sounds indicating Olson's arrival. He occasionally opened the door and looked down the trail into the swirling snow.
All Kaasen could hear was the wind as it moaned through the buildings abandoned after the gold rush. It had been years since he could remember such a strong wind, and for a moment he worried that Olson had been pinned down by the storm somewhere out on the trail. He had no way of knowing when or if Olson would arrive, and so he had to stay ready to move out at any moment.
The dogs needed to be fed. There were thirteen of them staked outside in line. Kaasen struggled out the door and fed each one of them salmon and a chunk of tallow. This would provide the necessary calories to keep the dogs warm.
Kaasen had taken a chance in choosing Balto as his lead dog. Named by Seppala after a Laplander who had accompanied the explorer Fridtjof Nansen on his 1888-89 expedition to Greenland, Balto was relatively inexperienced. Seppala considered the animal to be second rate. He was too slow to make the first string, and was used principally to haul freight on short runs.
Kaasen thought more highly of Balto. The dog may not have been as fast as the others, but he was steady and strong.
By 1925, Kaasen and Seppala had already been working together for years organizing Hammon Consolidated's water irrigation system of the gold fields. Kaasen often used the dogs for company and personal trips. The two men came from the same region of Norway, but they could not have been more different. Kaasen was a towering and tough man, six feet two, gruff and introverted. He had a quiet, no-nonsense way about him.
"Either you listened to him or you got thumped on the head," one of his relatives said fondly. Fondly, because the driver had a gentle side, which came out more in acts of kindness than in words. He had a passion for vanilla ice cream and loved to share it with anyone who had an appetite, and he kept the door open to any boy or girl hungry for his wife's famous cinnamon rolls.
Two hours later, around 7:00 p.m., Kaasen heard a faint shout outside. It had to be Olson. Kaasen pushed open the door. It was clear that Olson had had a bitter ride. His hands were too numb from frostbite to unlash the serum, and his seven dogs, short-haired for sled dogs, were stiff in the groin. Kaasen helped the musher inside the roadhouse and sat him down. Then he went back outside to retrieve the serum and bring the team inside. Olson had tied rabbit-fur blankets around each dog's groin, but this was not enough protection. All seven limped into the cabin and lay down stiffly on the floor. "They couldn't have gone much further," Kaasen observed.
It had taken Olson nearly four and a half hours to travel the twenty-five miles from Golovin to Bluff. Putting on the dog blankets had nearly cost him his fingers. The wind chill temperature had been well below minus 70 degrees and in such weather a driver could expose his hands for only thirty seconds at a time before the flesh freezes. It had taken Olson of course much longer to blanket his seven dogs. In the warm cabin, Olson pulled off his gloves. His fingers were white and hard as stone; at best it would be days before their full use would be restored.
As they sat in the roadhouse, Olson told his story.
The wind had repeatedly blown the team off the trail and at the lagoon just outside Golovin a gust of hurricane force slammed into the rig, hurling him and the team into a nearby drift. Olson had fought in the dark to dig his way out and untangle the dogs, but the struggle had worn him out. Despite his two parkas and a double far hood, the forty-six-year-old bachelor could not keep warm in the blizzard. Olson was as tough as they come in Alaska, accustomed to the rugged demands of mining alone in the northwest. He had seen the worst that the Seward Peninsula could throw at a dog team and for a moment he thought that he would not make it.
Now, looking out the cabin window, Olson could see a vortex of snow in the air. He warned Kaasen to hold off However much Nome needed the serum, this was not the weather to travel in. Kaasen looked around the room: Olson's fingers were burning with pain; the dogs lay crippled, ragged and exhausted on the floor. It was good advice. Kaasen would heed it, but only to a point.
Two hours later, the wind still had not died down. If anything, it had risen and it was getting colder. It was ten o'clock and the temperature was minus 28, without the wind chill. Snow was coming down fast and being blown by the wind. If he didn't leave now, the trail to Port Safety, thirty-four miles away, would be impassable with drifts. Kaasen stepped outside. In all his twenty-four years in Nome, he had never felt such a blast. One report put the wind's speed in excess of 70 mph. "I had seal mukluks on my feet. They go up to the hips. And I had sealskin pants over them. On my head I had a reindeer parka and hood and a drill parka over that. But the wind was so strong that it went right through the skins."
Kaasen made his decision. "There wasn't any use in waiting." He would head out.
When all thirteen dogs were hooked up to the gang line, he went back inside and got the serum. With his heavy parka reaching below his waist and his face hidden deep inside the fur ruff of his hood, Kaasen loomed in the doorway like some mythological giant of the north. He said a brief good-bye to Olson, opened the door, and stepped back out into the night.
Few drivers had the courage, the know-how, and the dogs to face a blizzard head-on. No amount of movement can keep a musher warm in such conditions. Most travelers caught out in a blizzard stop and make camp. Yet even that can be a dangerous business, for on this coast there are few trees to fuel a fire. A driver has only the sled to hide behind and his sleeping bag, fur robes, and dogs to help keep him warm. He can remain holed up like that for days until the blizzard abates and it is safe to carry on. Sourdoughs had a saying for the times when they found themselves stranded by a blizzard. "We are up against it. Up against it good and strong."
Stumbling through a blizzard, "you don't know whether to pray, curse or cry. You generally do all three together," the All Alaska Sweepstakes racer Scotty Allan once said. "But after a while the blizzard becomes a hated thing with a personality. You get that back to the wall feeling, and like a man in the heat of battle, you forget to feel afraid. You grow to glory in the fight with the damned thing."
A blizzard attacks a musher by causing confusion. His eyelashes freeze shut, his face is pounded by snowy blasts every way he turns, and he loses his sense of direction. "You can't see it. You can't lay hands on it. You can only feel it," Allan said. The stories of the men and dogs who had survived the Alaskan blizzards would pass into legend. Allan once claimed that nine out of ten dogs would turn tail in the face of a blizzard. The fearless ones were prized throughout the Seward Peninsula and these brave few could inspire an entire team. These were the leaders the mushers depended upon for their lives.
Allan left behind a vivid description of mushing in a blizzard. On the final ninety-mile stretch to Nome during the sweepstakes, his team was enveloped in "air thick as smoke with whirling snow. Gritty as salt it was, and stinging like splinters of steel. It baked into my furs and into the coats of my dogs, until we were encased in snow crusts solid as ice. The din deafened me. I couldn't hear, couldn't see, couldn't breathe. I felt as if the dogs and I were fighting all the devilish elements in the universe." Every fifteen minutes, Allan stopped his team and crawled up the gang line, putting a hand on each dog to check his condition. The younger dogs were whining and trying to bury themselves beneath the snow, but every time Allan reached the front of the team, he found the leader, Baldy, "sturdy and brave as a little polar bear...a small brave bit of life in that vast, storm-swept waste...I'd melt the ice away from his face and hug him," and then fumble back to the sled. "I was so darned proud and happy over that pup I just couldn't find the words to tell him what I thought of him," Allan said. Kaasen too would have trouble finding the words to describe the courage of his own leader, Balto.
Five miles into the run, Kaasen's worst fears materialized. Since leaving the roadhouse, the wind had sanded the trail down to a hard
and fast crust, but here by a ridge a towering drift had formed, blocking the trail. Balto tried to run his way through, but he and the other dogs quickly became mired in the snow. Kaasen waded in after them to clear a path, but he too floundered as the snow rose up to his chest. There was no way the team could get through to the other side except by retreating and then going around the ridge. Kaasen had to turn the dogs around. He grabbed Balto's harness and together they dragged the team in a tight arc through the drift and back out the way they had come. Getting around the ridge would be difficult. Balto had worked largely on the trails to the various dredge sites beyond Nome, and Kaasen was asking the dog to find an unfamiliar trail in unfamiliar territory in the pitch dark of the blizzard. Kaasen could barely see 100 feet ahead of him. Balto lurched forward and tentatively plowed his way through the snow along the back of the ridge. He understood that he had to regain the trail, to find the faint scent of dogs that had pattered before him that winter. Balto kept his nose low to ground, his ears flattened against his head to keep out the wind, as he moved slowly over the snow.
A dog's sense of smell is at least 600 to 700 times more powerful than that of a human and Balto was capable of smelling the tracks left behind by other dogs several feet beneath the snow. A canine's paws too are sensitive and would help Balto feel the hard-packed surface of a trail that had been covered over by new snow. Minutes passed like hours. They were beyond the ridge and still Balto searched. Suddenly, the dog lifted his head and broke out into a run. They were back on the trail.
A few miles farther on, the trail turned hard again as Kaasen entered a valley. It was Topkok River, its frozen surface wiped clean of snow by the wind. His right cheek began to sting with frostbite. Crossing the river, as he neared the west bank, Balto stopped. Kaasen went to the head of the team and saw a large stretch of overflow that Balto had run right into and now refused to go further. It was shallow but deep enough to have soaked the dog's feet. Kaasen turned the team off the river, dried Balto's feet, and then moved on.
The Cruelest Miles: the Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic Page 23