When I pull onto the lake and park the truck it’s 30 below zero. If we’re lucky it might warm up to 20 below for an hour or two this afternoon. Some of my friends who helped me last year are waiting to act as handlers. Nobody’s moving very fast, and—also as usual—I’m starting to have second thoughts about this whole affair.
I check my watch and discover we’re behind schedule. The 26 teams are leaving two at a time; I get to go head-to-head with Martin Buser. This is about like matching the Budweiser Clydesdales against a team of Triple Crown thoroughbreds—we might give them a run for a little ways, but the natural order of things will reassert itself pretty quickly after that.
As my start time draws perilously near, we are frantically hooking up the dogs and bootying them. The sled is packed—sort of—and I just hope I’ve got everything in it I’ll need. I’m still trying to get my parka on as we get into the starting gate. I don’t even hear the countdown and look up from fiddling with my parka zipper to see Martin’s team exploding out of the chute. The starter yells at me to go and everybody backs away from my team, leaving me holding on to the handlebar with one hand and the infernally stubborn zipper with the other. I don’t get fully assembled until we’re half a mile down the trail, which fortunately runs along the level ice of Big Lake for the first couple of miles.
While I’m putting myself together, my fresh-out-of-the-box team pulls up to Martin’s heels; I must step on the drag to hold them back so they won’t overrun him. I don’t want to pass him because he’ll just return the favor in a few hundred yards and we’ll run the risk of a high speed tangle. Suddenly he slows and pulls over to the ice road paralleling the trail, where a pickup-load of people seem to want a picture, which he obliges. In the meantime, we zoom past. I’ve actually passed Martin Buser, even though I know it will be short-lived. Sure enough, he catches me a mile later and shoots by. However, I’m not being passed by too many other teams, and my guys are hanging in there better than I’d hoped. Maybe this will work out okay after all.
After we leave the smooth ice of Big Lake, the trails steadily deteriorate. By the time we reach Little Cow Lake, about 25 miles out, things are looking really grim. As we lurch up off the tiny lake onto the 300-yard portage to Cow Lake, there isn’t a trail to speak of—just bare roots and dirt and stumps. I wouldn’t drive a four-wheeler over it on a bet, but nobody tells this to the dogs, who merrily bound through the nightmare as if it were just another fun run.
As we crest the small hill the trail turns sharply to the right and downhill around a big birch with an exposed root. The sled catches the root, tips over, and suddenly I’m dragging behind it, attached only by the tie-off rope looped around my left mitten. I try to hang on, but the rope pulls the thick mitten right off my hand and the team roars on down the hill onto the lake. I jump up and shout at a musher 100 yards ahead to stop the team. (The rules of the trail call for any musher to always try to stop a runaway team.) He tries and misses, but then I notice two cross-country skiers on the lake who have deployed themselves like a special forces ambush team to catch my free-wheeling dogs. As I watch, they neatly corral the leaders and bring everything to a smooth stop.
Relieved beyond words, I stomp out to the team. I thank the skiers profusely for saving the team (and my chance to finish the race). Of course, the dogs think it is all a lark and zoom off as soon as I climb back on the runners. They’re still rolling when we get to Red Shirt Lake, whose three-mile length we traverse quickly.
Off the far end of Red Shirt the overland trail picks up again, and this time it is simply beyond words. The track winds up a small inlet creek in the middle of a swamp studded with protruding clumps of dirt and grass, all frozen solid. It looks for all the world like a pinball game with a zillion mushroom bumpers, except I’m the ball and the dogs are playing a mean tune on the flippers. The sled spills several times but I hang on for dear life and finally figure out how to ride it low and loose to minimize the impacts.
But the pinball swamp is nothing compared to the ensuing “trail” through the woods. There aren’t any trees in the right-of-way, but that’s about all that’s missing (besides the snow). It’s a maze of roots, potholes, fallen logs, loose sticks, rocks, and worst of all, stumps and stobs up to eight inches high that can easily rip the bottom out of the sled if I’m not careful. It is simply not a sled trail, or any kind of a trail, for that matter. Now I know why the trailblazers refused to run their snowmachines over it. Any normal human would have a tough time merely walking this morass, much less trying to guide a bouncing, 100-pound sled over it behind a team of overeager dogs.
Fortunately the worst part only lasts a few miles and then we’re on South Rolly Lake, which is part of a race course for sprint mushers. As I pull onto the lake, where our trail shares theirs for a couple of hundred yards, I notice a 16-dog sprint team roaring around the far end of the lake at 20 miles an hour. I wonder if they have any idea of the hideous trail only a stone’s throw from their groomed speedway. I’m tempted to just let my team follow the sprinters and call this whole thing off before I destroy the team, the sled, and me.
Somehow I manage to get my leaders to stay on our trail, which leaves the lake, follows a road, and then drops down a hill to North Rolly Lake. We slightly overshoot the entrance to the down-trail to the lake and I have to stop the team and let everyone maneuver over to the two big boulders marking the gateway. In the process the lead and swing dogs get tangled across the rocks and break a couple of necklines, which I stop and fix before proceeding.
Starting down this hill from a dead stop turns out to be maybe the luckiest thing I do on the whole race. After 10 yards, I see to my horror the slope is impossibly steep, narrow, and winding. I jam on the brake and feverishly unhook my big snowmachine-track drag, which I’ve had up out of the way to keep it from catching on the obstacles in the trails. As soon as the drag hits the icy snow I jump on it with both feet so hard I think I’ve sprained both ankles. I manage to hold the team to a slow lope down the hill and only kiss three or four trees, barely missing a major crash-and-burn at the bottom where the trail makes a sharp left turn onto the lake around a huge birch. As I regain my composure crossing the lake, I can’t imagine why anyone would have chosen such an exercise in madness as part of a major race—it’s positively dangerous.
After the hill conditions moderate somewhat as we traverse smooth lakes interspersed with short stretches of horrible trail. I take some wrong turns on a few of the lakes thanks to the sparse markings, but manage to get straightened out without much trouble. We roll onto Long Lake behind the town of Willow about five hours after the start; I know it well, having landed my little float plane on it many times, and my good friends Rich and Jeannette Keida live on its upper reaches. The lake is 40 miles from the start, so we’re making very reasonable time. Still, I’ve not seen any other mushers for almost an hour and I’m certain everyone has passed me. This doesn’t bother me too much, since I’m not trying to win this race or even qualify for the Iditarod.
The dogs settle into an easy 10-mile-an-hour pace as we pull onto the section of trail running in the ditch line beside the Parks Highway. It’s dark by now and cars and heavy trucks roar by not 20 feet away. The dogs remain blissfully oblivious to everything, trotting steadily on. After awhile we dip down to Little Willow Creek and cross under the highway bridge to work our way back toward the Talkeetna Mountains on a section of trail I haven’t seen before.
I know the trail to Sheep Creek (the first checkpoint, only nine miles from home) runs along the Anchorage-Fairbanks Intertie powerline and will be impossible to miss once I’m on it. However, the trails we are following to get to the powerline seem to be wandering around a bit, and I take half a dozen abortive excursions up likely-looking branch trails until I figure out the overall pattern of things.
Eventually I see the 100-foot Intertie towers etched against the starry sky and we follow them northward. Ten miles later we hit a stretch of trail John Barron has warned me about.
He had to put it in himself a couple of weeks earlier the old-fashioned way—with his dog team, because no one would run a snowmachine over it; he was worried it would be really rough. As it turns out, it’s not as bad as some of what we’ve already survived, although it’s extremely slow going with lots of brush overhanging the trail.
Mount Foraker, the third highest peak in Alaska at 17,400 feet above sea level and southern companion to Mount McKinley, towers 70 miles in the distance beyond the Yentna River.
As we draw nearer to Sheep Creek, I start to recognize familiar landmarks and stretches of trail I ran in the Sheep Creek race in December of 1994. We manage to avoid any more major upheavals and pull strongly into Sheep Creek a little after nine o’clock. To my shock and surprise, I find I’m not last—in fact, I’m the fourteenth musher in, right in the middle of the pack. The checker asks me if I saw anyone else, because half a dozen mushers seem to be lost on the trail, a development I find completely understandable given my own experience.
I just shake my head at my good fortune and tend to the dogs, who are in good shape and excellent spirits after the tough run. The temperature at Sheep Creek is 32 below, which has been normal for our neck of the woods in the evenings for the past month or so. I’ve dropped off a bale of straw to supplement whatever the race provides, so my guys get enough bedding to hole up for a week. After they’re fed and settled down, I head inside the lodge for a bite to eat and to catch up on what else has been happening.
I find out John Barron was the first driver in, just after six o’clock; I can’t imagine how he kept his sled upright at that kind of a pace. He’s preparing to leave at 11 or so, followed closely by his son Will, Steve Adkins (another of my neighbors), and Martin Buser. Everyone is grumbling about the abysmal trail and the confusing markings. Apparently almost every driver got lost somewhere or other, many more than once; one has called in from Willow, where he returned after wandering around on the trail to Sheep Creek for hours. Several others are still unaccounted for, although no one is worried they will eventually turn up. This kind of pathfinding exercise isn’t normally expected in a big race, but it’s definitely part of mushing, and there’s no substitute for “trail sense” to keep things from getting out of hand.
I also learn the hill down onto North Rolly Lake that scared me so badly wasn’t even supposed to be part of the race trail—it’s actually a footpath marked by mistake. I hadn’t noticed as I screamed down the twisting incline, but there were pieces of sleds all over the hill from several calamitous wrecks by the mushers ahead of me.
The hill directly caused two mushers to scratch. Bob Welch, a rookie trying to qualify for the Iditarod, hit a tree so hard it splintered his sled, split his sternum, and broke a rib so forcefully the jagged end almost pierced his heart. A musher close behind him happened to be an emergency medical technician and immediately determined the injuries were life-threatening. The EMT borrowed a pistol and fired several shots in the air to get the attention of a circling airplane, which landed on the lake and evacuated Welch to the hospital, where he is in satisfactory condition—but definitely out of the Iditarod for this year.
Given the bad, confusing trails and the bitter cold, I think it will be prudent to play things more cautiously for the rest of the race. I decide to drop into a semi-survival mode, running mostly during the day and giving the dogs plenty of rest. After all, I’m not trying to win any money, and the Iditarod this year will likely be a full couple of weeks of what I’m seeing here.
We have to double back over the same trail to Willow before we turn west to the Susitna and Yentna Rivers for the run out to Yentna Station and Skwentna, after which we’ll return directly to Big Lake. My new game plan is to leave Sheep Creek just before dawn, so I can hit the worst part of the trail to Willow about first light. I was having trouble seeing things in the trail in my headlight beam on the way in, and I don’t want to risk hitting something that might hurt the dogs or wreck the sled. I also want daylight to make sure I don’t get lost on the maze of sloughs and channels in the rivers, which have additionally been crisscrossed by thousands of snowmachiners, who use them as highways.
Most important, I resolve to drive the dogs all the way out to Skwentna (the farthest point on the race), regardless of how long it takes. Once I’m out there, I can’t scratch, since the only way to get the dogs back will be to run them in to Big Lake. After my Iditarod fiasco last year, I intend to finish this race if it’s humanly (and caninely) possible. The Klondike has become a critical personal benchmark of my ability to keep myself going; I’m not going to blow it now.
Sunday—The Klondike 300: Sheep Creek to Yentna Station (70 miles)
After a quick meal and a few hours’ nap I’m up to get the dogs ready about five o’clock. It’s pushing 40 below, but the dogs aren’t bothered. On the other hand, Yankee and Buck had a minor altercation during the evening. They apparently got cranky because they were tired and snapped at each other for a few minutes. This is an occupational hazard when running a team heavy on big males like mine is this year; I try to minimize the opportunities for conflict, but some will flare up regardless.
Buck has a couple of minor bite marks; Yankee is up and ready to go, but he winces when I touch his tail while harnessing him up. Buck must have gotten him there, and it appears painful enough to convince me to drop him because the tugline on the back of the harness will probably bother him as he runs. There’s no point in subjecting him to any extra harassment. He’s a proven performer and is in good shape; he’ll be ready for the Iditarod even if he doesn’t finish this race.
Finally we’re ready to go. The checkers tell me half a dozen teams have scratched already, and I should watch out for two teams still straggling up the trail from Willow. We roll out of the checkpoint and back out onto the trail in good order. Old Socks is leading; he’s not my fastest leader but he’s utterly dependable, especially on questionable trails like the one we’re on. Besides, I don’t want an express-train leader bounding through this stuff, where I have almost no time to react even under the best conditions.
We make good time for an hour or so down the powerline trail, which is just as bad as I remember it coming in. We pass one of the lost teams limping dazed back the way we came; the driver says his sled is busted and his dogs are beat and all he wants to do is get into Sheep Creek and scratch. I feel thankful my team is basically in one piece and resolve to keep it that way for the remaining 200 miles.
We work our way south as the predawn light slowly brightens, exposing a cold, frost-covered landscape—and the grim trail. As we go up a low hill I know has a sharp drop on the far side, Socks takes a wrong turn, following what looks like a recent trail. I know it’s not the correct path, but I assume it will quickly loop back to the main trail like these little spurs always do. Two seconds too late I realize the side trail isn’t going to rejoin the main one in time.
Even as I’m getting ready to stop the team and bring them around, the sled comes to a wrenching halt in the middle of a thicket of willow shrubs that have grown up where the original forest was cleared from the powerline right-of-way years ago. I almost pitch over the handlebar and into the team, which is in complete disarray with dogs everywhere. Necklines have snapped, tuglines have come loose, and the gangline is wrapped around every dog and tree in sight.
The one- and two-inch-thick trunks of the willows look as if they’ve grown up through the team and the sled, so completely are we tangled. I have never seen anything so snarled. And if I ever get everything back in order, the way ahead is down a 50-foot slope strewn with fallen logs. The main trail is at the bottom of the hill, but there’s no way I’m going to get there from here.
At least nobody is hurt and everything seems to be more or less intact. The problem will be one of somehow extricating team and sled from this boreal jungle. With a sigh I walk up and sit down next to Socks and ponder the situation. The sun is slowly coming up over the Talkeetna Mountains to the southeast and we watch a beautiful su
nrise even as I work out a salvage plan.
By the time the pink and blue of dawn have given way to the orange and yellow of the sun as it rises above the jagged ridges, I am well on my way to sorting things out. I have to use my saw and ax to do a bit of unauthorized logging, but eventually I get enough working room to lead the team back up the hill, and then to manhandle the sled around to face the way we came.
After lining out the dogs, replacing the broken snaps and lines, and reconnecting everything, we’re off again—directly back up the trail for a few hundred yards until I can find an open area to bring the team around. It’s taken the better part of an hour, but we’re underway in the proper direction again, none the worse for wear. As we bounce on down the narrow, brush-choked trail, I’m too busy fighting the sled to even think about getting mad or frustrated. It’s just been part of the game, yet another problem to be solved in what has been—and promises to continue to be—a long string of problems.
We eventually make it back to the better trails and then under the Little Willow Creek bridge and onto the ditch line along the highway. It’s mid-morning on a Sunday but there’s still plenty of traffic. In particular, I notice at least half a dozen dog trucks headed north over a space of half an hour, probably on their way for a day of training runs on the relatively good trails in the upper Susitna Valley (or maybe heading up to Sheep Creek to pick up teams which have scratched from this race).
In western Alaska, only the larger rivers have significant greenbelts of trees.
Alaska Dogs and Iditarod Mushers Page 28