After a couple of teeth-rattling repetitions I finally get the brake to work and drag the team down to walking speed. If this were a ski slope, it would be marked “Expert” and the Ski Patrol would be doing a land-office business picking up the casualties. Fifteen minutes later, we reach a flat stretch and I let the dogs resume their pace.
About then I turn around and see another musher—whom I don’t recognize immediately but finally identify as Martin Buser—charging up behind me. I find a wide spot in the trail and stop the team while he passes. His dogs step smartly by and accelerate rapidly out of sight like an expensive European luxury car. My team can’t even begin to catch up and I resign myself to being passed by everyone else before the lap is over. I suppose this is what they call character building. I feel a little better knowing many of those who are passing me are either sprint racers or will finish in the top 20 in the Iditarod.
The next two hours are a jumbled mix of moguls, soft punchy trails, being passed by everything including the kitchen sink, and to top it all off, a gathering snowstorm. I refuse to let the dogs go faster than a walk over the moguls, even though I see other mushers hitting them full speed. They must know something I don’t, but until I learn their secret I won’t risk injuring my dogs a couple of weeks before my first real Iditarod qualifying race.
By the time I’m on the track back inbound, everybody who’s going to pass me has done so. The snow is heavy and stings my face unmercifully. Like a fool I’ve left my goggles in the car; another lesson learned—never get on the sled without all the equipment I might need. I also left my headlamp behind, and this run is taking so long I won’t be back until well into twilight.
The last hour is a plodding journey through thickening snow into deepening darkness. Finally we pass a few remembered landmarks signaling the end is only a few miles away and the dogs suddenly break into a lope. Somehow the team knows we’re coming to the end; I hang on as we whip through the last stretch of trail. I get in dead last, but the team has finished very strongly and everyone says so. Barrie and Ron help me put the dogs away and we all head into the bar for a cup of coffee.
The second day goes much better. In most multiple-heat races, the order of finish determines the next day’s start positions. This means I’m starting out at the tail end, so I have nowhere to go but up. The weather is near-perfect and the trail is in great shape, fast and hard. Besides, I know it well enough now to let the dogs roll a bit. They respond admirably and we actually pass a couple of teams within a few miles after we start. On the way in I note the goggles and headlamp I carefully included won’t be necessary today, even though I started an hour later. The dogs are actually running flat out for the last five miles; it seems they are thoroughly in the spirit of the race and enjoying themselves.
We storm across the finish line an hour faster than yesterday, cutting more time off our first day’s run than anyone else. I thought for awhile we might get the red lantern for being last, but we’ve done so well we move up a position and are instead recognized as “most improved,” which I find infinitely more satisfying.
I’ve survived my first race. I still can’t believe I’m actually running dogs with the same mushers I’ve watched for years while flying for the Iditarod. More important, it seems I’ve actually learned something. But I also know this is only the beginning. I’ve just graduated from dog-driver grade school, and I have two months to earn what amounts to a Ph.D. in mushing before I can run the Iditarod.
December 31, 1994—January 1, 1995
The Knik 200
Knik to Skwentna and Return
The Iditarod requires rookies (meaning anyone who hasn’t run the race before) to qualify by finishing one or two races totaling at least 500 miles. Iditarod hopefuls in Southcentral Alaska frequently run the Knik 200 as their first race, and either the Copper Basin 300 or the Klondike 300 a couple of weeks later as their second one. Barrie and I have chosen to do the Knik 200 and the Copper Basin 300. Race day for the Knik 200—New Year’s Eve—is on us before we realize it. For me, this will be by far the longest run I’ve made, even though it will probably be a yawner for the dogs, most of whom have been to Nome at least once or twice. So, the test is not so much for the dogs but for me, and how well I can keep the team focused on the task at hand.
As distance races go, the Knik 200 isn’t particularly difficult, consisting of a 100-mile run out the first section of the Iditarod Trail to Skwentna, followed by a six-hour layover and a return over the same route. On the other hand, it is the first real distance race of the season in this area. Anything from 200 to 500 miles is considered “mid-distance” in the world of dog mushing, although most mortals would consider 200 miles on the back of a dog sled to be a Really Long Trip, official nomenclature notwithstanding.
Ron will run with us on the Knik as a sort of advisor and to put the miles on his dogs for training. So, while normal people are watching bowl games on television, we’re trucking our teams 80 miles down to the tiny settlement of Knik, across Turnagain Arm from Anchorage.
I’ve gotten virtually no sleep the night before the race. In fact, I haven’t had much more than a nap since our practice run over part of this trail two days ago, when we ran 35 miles out to Flathorn Lake and back. I’ve drawn number 28, which lets me leave well toward the rear of the 40-team pack. At least I won’t be overtaken by too many drivers and I can let the team settle into its stride without a lot of interruptions for passes.
The weather is astonishingly mild. It’s been above freezing the past few days thanks to a big low pressure system in the Gulf of Alaska pumping in Hawaiian air. This will be great for the mushers but the dogs might flag a little more easily, since they’ve been training in considerably colder temperatures and are permanently dressed for the “real” Alaska winter.
Before the race start of any distance race, an official must check the loaded sled for all of the required equipment: ax, cooker, sleeping bag, snowshoes, booties, and (for the Iditarod) a mail packet. All of these items must be in the sled at all times until completing the race.
As we mainline coffee before the race and nervously await the time to start hooking up, I stop to think about Knik’s prominent position in the history of mushing. With its tidewater dock on Cook Inlet, it was the main starting point for teams on the original Iditarod Trail. Beginning about 1910 and lasting until airplanes started to take over in the 1930s, as many as 120 freight and mail teams a month started from this exact spot headed for the gold fields of interior Alaska, with many going ultimately to Nome.
Those intrepid drivers sometimes had 20 big dogs hauling two or three long freight sleds laden with a ton of everything from gold dust to gasoline engines to paying passengers. They’d stop every evening at a roadhouse or village after traveling perhaps 25 miles, most of which was spent walking or wrestling the heavy sleds. The Iditarod—and distance mushing in general, for that matter—is really a recreation of the world of the freight and mail mushers, a time when winter transportation in most of Alaska was via dog team. Of course, our light sleds and 100-pound loads are nothing compared to what the old-timers sweated and fought along the trail. I’m a little awed just to be following in their footsteps for a bit on this race.
With 40 teams signed up, the cramped starting area in front of the Knik Bar is the usual madhouse of eager dogs, frantic mushers, scurrying handlers, and wandering spectators. There are more than 600 dogs in an area about a third the size of the average Wal-Mart parking lot. Many teams are running 16 dogs, the maximum; Barrie and Ron and I are only taking 14, which we feel is plenty to get out and back while maintaining a measure of control.
To put this in perspective, every two-dog section of gangline is eight to 10 feet in length, which stretches a 16-dog team plus the sled to 75 or 80 feet. That’s as long as a full-sized semi-trailer rig, except the musher is standing all the way at the back of the trailer with little more to control the canine diesel tractor than dragging his (or her) foot on the snow and hoping the
dog at the steering wheel will follow commands. The Iditarod limit this year will be 16 dogs; it was formerly 20, which resulted in more than a few teams becoming unguided missiles early in the race when the dogs were fresh and frantically eager to run. All things considered, 14 dogs are plenty for us rookies, at least for now.
As every straining team is hooked up and wrestled out to the starting line by as many as 10 handlers, the dogs on the remaining teams ratchet a notch higher on the excitement scale. As chaotic as it seems, this is really nothing compared to the Iditarod start, which is probably the biggest collection of screaming dogs in the world in one small area.
My start goes smoothly, at least until about 30 seconds before the starter says “Go!” Somebody helping hold back my surging team casually asks me whether I intended to hook up the gangline so it runs over rather than under the brush bow at the front of the sled. Obviously I didn’t, because the gangline will be rubbing on the hard edge of the brush bow and could start to fray, which in turn might lead to the line breaking and the team running loose down the trail.
I feel like an idiot, but there’s nothing I can do except get out on the trail and find a place to stop the team, undo the dogs’ tuglines, anchor everything on a tree, and then make the 10-second fix. I wonder what else I’ve forgotten to do as the starter counts down and we rocket out of the chute.
Things settle down quickly out on the trail. Surprisingly, I’m only passed by one or two teams, and actually overtake several myself. I keep a close eye on the mis-rigged gangline, but it seems not to be chafing so I push on, not wanting to break the dogs’ rhythm.
The first few hours go like clockwork, partly because we’ve seen this stretch of trail before. I even get the gangline re-routed with no trouble during a five-minute pit stop. About 20 miles out of Knik, we come to a hand-painted wooden sign at a fork in the trail. Over a prominent left-turn arrow it says in gold letters, “Nome 1049 miles.” We’re not going to Nome, at least not this trip, but I get a thrill as I realize I’m actually running my own team over a part of the real, honest-to-goodness Iditarod Trail in a serious race leading to the Iditarod itself. After months of work and training, I can finally see something tangible to mark my progress from rank civilian to aspiring dog musher, and it’s very gratifying.
The Knik 200 is traditionally the start of the distance racing season in south central Alaska. It follows the route of the Iditarod from Knik out to Skwentna and back. For the 1995 race, 40 teams made the journey.
At the 45-mile point we roll onto the broad, frozen Susitna River as night falls and then swing up its main tributary, the Yentna. Although I’ve flown this river so many times I can recite waypoints in my sleep, everything is different on the ground. The first thing I have to learn is to adjust to life at 10 miles an hour, for hours on end. It’s really not that bad, and there are plenty of reminders of substantial movement and progress. On the other hand, in the middle of a half-mile-wide river things can seem to be frozen in time, and the next bend always seems to take forever to arrive.
I spend a lot of time running without my headlamp. On the white nighttime expanse of the river, this yields a peculiar sensation of floating. The team and the sled and even me seem to be suspended in midair, on a magic carpet of sorts. I flip on my Walkman and the music I’ve carefully selected for just such a situation adds the soundtrack completing the illusion. It’s a shame I can’t bottle these moments and save them. If I could sell them, I’m sure I’d be rich beyond avarice.
On the upper reaches of the river, after we’ve passed most of the cabins, I’m traveling with Ron and Barrie on the last 35-mile leg into Skwentna. Rounding one isolated bend, I’m surprised when the dogs suddenly all look to the left, at the south bank of the river. They make no noise and don’t speed up as they would if they scented a moose. I stab the bank with my headlamp but see nothing. The dogs keep staring as they run, until after a few minutes we’re back to normal. Barrie tells me her dogs did the same thing, and so do several other mushers.
An experienced driver later tells me it was wolves, which are defi-nitely not an endangered species in this area. For me, the feeling was primitive and mysterious; my dogs sensed something from another world, another time, something from which I was excluded. I was being silently watched by eyes from what amounts to another universe, being evaluated by intellects totally alien to my understanding.
In two decades I’ve flown planes all over Alaska and hiked many miles as well, but here on the Yentna River, with my dogs running silently in front of me, isolated from the modern mechanical world I’ve always taken for granted, is the first time I’ve actually felt the undiluted primeval soul of the North Country. I can begin to understand what other mushers have told me: driving dogs is the only way to see the “real” Alaska.
Finally the long hours in the darkness and now below-zero temperatures bring us to Skwentna, where we pull in just after 11 p.m., less than 12 hours after leaving Knik. We’ve actually made pretty good time, considering our periodic breaks to tend to the dogs. Soon after we arrive and begin to feed and bed down the dogs, we hear fireworks going off through the trees. The New Year has arrived. If someone had told me last year I’d be spending this New Year’s Eve at Skwentna tending to my dog team, I’d have collapsed laughing. I’m not laughing now, although I’m so tired I might collapse anyway.
I start feeding the team, Silvertip and Yankee first. They are my biggest dogs and have happily run beside each other in wheel all day. However, like many sled dogs after a long run, they’ve become grouchy now that we’ve stopped and immediately begin to quarrel over a chunk of frozen lamb I carelessly toss between them. Without thinking, I lunge into the fray and grab Silvertip’s collar; Yankee obliges by taking a chunk out of my little finger as he tries for Silvertip’s ear. I manage to pull them apart with help from a nearby musher who wades in swinging her aluminum feeding dipper, which does no harm to the dogs but certainly gets their attention.
Yankee has managed to puncture Silvertip’s left front foot, which is bleeding and is obviously causing some pain. Silvertip, although younger and inexperienced, seems to be learning his trade and has gotten in his licks, opening cuts on Yankee’s ear and muzzle. I can patch Yankee up with no trouble, but I don’t want to force Silvertip to run on his foot. I reluctantly lead him over to the dropped dog area. He’ll get a quick look from the vet tonight, a plane ride back to Knik in the morning, and will be waiting for me when I return.
His injuries are quite minor, but I’m a bit shaken because he is my personal companion, whom I raised from a puppy before I ever decided to get into mushing. I never intended him to be a sled dog, but he has become one of my best—a true “walk-on” of whom I’m inordinately proud because I trained him myself. At least he’s pulled well coming out, and he’ll be ready to go again in a few days.
After leaving Silvertip with the vet, a sharp pain in my left hand reminds me I’ve sustained a worse wound than either of the dogs. My little finger has a one-inch gash ripped completely out of it, almost to the bone, and it’s bleeding profusely. I shake my head at my own stupidity in jumping into the middle of a brawl between two 70-pound male dogs in top combat trim.
The approved solution, of course, is to prevent fights in the first place. For obvious reasons, no sensible musher will keep a habitual fighter. Likewise, any driver who has a dog that attacks other teams is quietly asked not to enter any more races with it. But even non-fighters will occasionally not get along, and quarrelsome combinations must be separated within the team. And without proper supervision, even best friends can quickly revert to atavistic behavior during the critical feeding period, especially when they are tired or stressed.
Often an authoritatively shouted “Knock it off!” can defuse a developing situation. Failing that, more drastic measures are needed to separate the combatants before they hurt each other. However, the occasional squabble is a part of mushing nobody likes and everyone tries to prevent, but which sometimes happens nonethe
less. Dogs (and particularly male dogs) will, after all, be dogs. I suppose I’ll have to chalk this up as another learning experience and do my best not to let it happen again.
I wander over to the New Skwentna Roadhouse (the original, 10 miles up the Skwentna River, was abandoned decades ago) to get my finger bandaged up enough to let me get back to Knik. Inside, most of the mushers are eating, talking, or sleeping. After I get my finger patched, I realize I’m ravenously thirsty and head for the nearest pitcher of ice water. Ron intercepts me and suggests I try Tang instead because it will quench my thirst better; he says it’s long been a favorite of distance mushers.
Half an hour later, after two quarts of the stuff, I have to admit he’s right. For no reason I think of the old Tang astronaut commercials; I can’t think of any activity farther from the high-tech space program than dog driving. I wonder if the Tang company has considered a spot featuring mushers, or what the astronauts would think about this rather more traditional form of voyaging.
I talk with other mushers for awhile until the leaders’ six-hour layovers start to expire. John Barron, a longtime contender in the Iditarod and other races (and previous winner of the Knik 200), whose trails we share around Montana Creek, was the first in and is the first out. We count him and his mushing family, which includes wife Kathy and sons Jason and Laird (both Iditarod veterans) and up-and-coming Will, as good friends. In fact, John has given Barrie and me several fine dogs and lots of advice on mushing that has proven its worth to us over and over. We wish him luck as he heads back down the trail. To me, he—like Ron—personifies the people who make mushing such a worthwhile endeavor, and I am honored to be accepted into such a worthy fraternity (or is it properly also a sorority these days?).
Alaska Dogs and Iditarod Mushers Page 12