Alaska Dogs and Iditarod Mushers

by Mike Dillingham

  I wave at them and every driver gives me a thumbs up or a flash of the lights in encouragement. I guess word of the tough trail on the Klondike is spreading; it’s starting to look like anyone who finishes will have uncontested bragging rights for awhile, and other mushers certainly appreciate this.

  Crossing Willow Creek as I continue down the highway, I notice there’s a team lined out behind the Pioneer Lodge, apparently one of the ones that scratched. I’m getting thirsty and we’ll be heading out onto the river in a few more miles, so I stop, tie off the dogs to a tree in the parking lot, and clump into the bar (which is open—this is Alaska, after all). There are a few people having breakfast and they look at me like I’ve just landed from Mars.

  Then I realize I probably look a sight, bundled up like some kind of polar mummy with icicles hanging from my beard, moustache, and eyebrows. I flash them a winning smile, hastily get a big glass of water, avail myself of the facilities, and head back out to the team, which has welcomed the 15-minute rest. Then we’re off down the highway, waving at Sunday-morning travelers and generally having not too bad a time, all things considered.

  After threading across Long, Crystal, and Vera Lakes, we debouch onto the swamps stretching to the Susitna River five miles away. The race route jumps from one trail to another and I’m glad I’m doing this part during daylight, because I’d surely have missed at least a couple of the turns. Most of the junctions are marked mainly with fluorescent surveyor’s tape, which is fine for daytime but almost invisible at night. There are a few reflective Klondike 300 markers for night use, but not nearly enough. I can only guess how many of the teams ahead of me got lost going through here before dawn this morning.

  Finally the trail re-enters the tree line hugging the 100-foot bluff overlooking the mile-wide river bottoms. We meander for a couple of miles on a well-defined but unmarked trail and I start to wonder if we’re on the right track. I flag down an oncoming snowmachiner and ask him if this is the proper trail; he says it is, and the hill down to the river is just ahead—and I should be careful to take a left at the bottom.

  In short order we plunge down a steep hill onto a frozen slough. The dogs want to go right, which I know heads back upstream, but I straighten them out quickly and we roll out onto the open expanse of the river. From here on we are supposed to follow the main snowmachine trail down the Ohio-sized Susitna to its junction with the equally broad Yentna, then up the Yentna to Yentna Station and ultimately Skwentna before turning around and retracing our steps back to Willow and then Big Lake.

  In the middle of its broad cliff-lined flood plain, the Susitna’s central channel has frozen up in a 100-yard-wide jumble of ice blocks, some standing several feet high. The trail is a highway packed down by thousands of snowmachines over the past couple of months. There are no roads west of the Susitna and most residents of the area use the frozen rivers for routine transportation as casually as automobile drivers use the freeways.

  Where the trail runs along the sandbars and smoother sloughs it is as much as 100 feet wide, with as many interlaced branches as the river under its blanket of snow and ice. Occasionally everything narrows into a yard-wide path snaking bumpily across the wasteland of the main channel to better terrain on the far bank. There is only a thin covering of snow on the ice, maybe a few inches, and where it has been packed it’s barely an inch.

  There’s no way to get a snow hook into the crust securely enough to stop the team. The only way I can inspect booties and straighten out tangles is to gently talk the dogs into stopping, set the hook as best I can, and lay the sled over on its side atop the hook. Then I figure I have a couple of minutes before the dogs get restless and start to go, dragging the overturned sled and the scraping hook, albeit slowly enough to allow me to easily catch them.

  Fortunately things are going fairly smoothly. I do have one problem, though: my brand-new, top-quality dog booties are wearing through frighteningly fast on these abrasive trails. Normally the booties should go 60 miles or more, but my bigger dogs are blowing them out in as little as 15. This is disturbing, if for no other reason than the booties cost 70 cents each and I don’t have an unlimited supply. Even worse, snow and ice will pack into a bootie with a hole in it, and the net result will be to amplify any damage to the dog’s foot. I’m worried I’m doing more harm to feet by inadvertently running holed booties than I would if I didn’t bootie at all.

  Finally I stop and rip off all the booties on the bigger dogs, except for a handful of sensitive or already-injured feet which must stay wrapped. I figure the dogs won’t be any worse off without booties, and besides, we’ve been training on hard, icy trails at Montana Creek all year and their feet have held up pretty well so far. In any case, I’ll give them all a good check at Yentna Station when we get there later this afternoon and decide what to do down the road.

  As the day wears on, the dogs start to slow down, to perhaps six or seven miles an hour. This is a normal phenomenon: dogs tend to run more slowly during the day, and especially when they’re out in wide-open spaces like rivers and lakes. Nobody seems to know why, other than dogs are mainly nocturnal and just don’t like to be exposed to the glare of day. I personally think they just get bored looking at miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles. At least at night their universe has bounds; out here on the broad river in the bright sun, and from their next-to-the-ice viewpoint, it just looks like a lot of white.

  Another problem is overheating—even at 20 below. All of the dogs are extremely well insulated, and their coats are especially thick this year because of the bitter cold we’ve had at Montana Creek. On a windless day like today, with the sun additionally warming the darker-coated dogs, they generate enough heat trotting to stay uncomfortably hot.

  Many of them try to “dip,” or grab a mouthful of snow from the trail on the fly; sometimes the less-adept ones will lose their footing and flop comically down for a second or two before bounding back to their feet. Once in awhile one of them does a truly Chaplinesque pratfall on a patch of ice and gets tangled; then I have to stop the team and go straighten out the miscreant, who often as not is already up and ready to go by the time I get the sled completely stopped.

  I only meet one team on the Susitna; I chat with the other driver for awhile as we run together. He spent the night on the river, apparently not wanting to risk the unfamiliar trail in the dark. Then his team got away from him this morning and he was just recovering them when I came by. He keeps stopping for various reasons and drops slowly behind as my team keeps up a steady if not exactly blistering pace.

  For the next five hours we trundle down the Susitna and up the lower Yentna. I’ve seen the Yentna several times before on the back of a sled, on both the Knik 200 and the Iditarod last year. Of course, I’ve flown over it so many times I can recite the landmarks in my sleep, which still doesn’t make things go any faster. The only breaks in the numbing monotony are dozens of snowmachines roaring up the trail, some of whose drivers courteously stop while my team goes by.

  I also get passed by a pickup truck hauling a 500-gallon fuel tank to a lodge on up the river. In fact, the snow is so thin this year a few brave souls have driven vehicles all the way to Skwentna. Even more than in most years, the frozen river has become an all-purpose extension of the state’s minuscule highway network.

  Finally we round a big horseshoe bend as dusk is falling and see the lights of Yentna Station on the far bank. Half a dozen teams are there, including leaders John Barron and John Schandelmeier, who have already been out to Skwentna and are on their way back to Big Lake. I ask the checkers where everybody else is, and they tell me 12 teams have scratched—almost half of the original starters in the race. Martin Buser and several of the other big names have dropped out, some because they didn’t want to risk their teams on the bad trails and some because they got lost or didn’t feel they had a chance at the money. Others—like Bob Welch—have broken sleds or broken bones, or both.

  This has apparently turned into som
e kind of iron-man race, and those of us who haven’t gotten lost or banged up are hanging in there for better or worse. In fact, aside from a handful of contenders who are after the prize money (which is considerable: $10,000 for first place and $5,000 for second) most of the remaining drivers are rookies who are simply trying to finish in order to qualify for the Iditarod. I don’t need to qualify, but I’m determined to finish anyway; hearing only a few of us are left actually makes me feel better about what I’m doing. Besides, there aren’t any more pre-Iditarod races I can easily do this year, so this is the only show in town.

  As soon as I get the dogs fed and settled down, I decide to drop Buck, who has been packing his harness and little more for the past 30 miles. He has a bite wound near his right front wrist from his Sheep Creek tiff with Yankee, and it’s bothering him enough to cause him to favor it. The vet agrees and gives him a shot of antibiotic to prevent any infection; he’ll fly out tomorrow and will be waiting for me at Big lake when I get back.

  I’d have kept him in the team if I could, because I wanted to put him in lead on the way back to see how he performed on the trail in a long haul. I still have nightmares about the Iditarod last year, when I spent so much time becalmed because I didn’t have leaders who would start the team. Buck has been a major part of my plan to combat that scenario and I would’ve liked to test him.

  But I have to think about the rest of this race. We are about halfway done, with 150 miles to go. The next leg is up the river to Skwentna, then return to Yentna Station, maybe 75 miles total. It shouldn’t be a hard pull, except the trails along the river aren’t marked and several of the front runners have admitted they got lost in a section about halfway to Skwentna where the river braids into dozens of channels. The hordes of snowmachiners have put trails up almost every slough, and they don’t all go through. Ramey Smyth, one of the best young mushers in the state, inadvertently got turned around on his way back to Yentna Station in the dark and went up river almost to Skwentna, costing him several hours.

  I decide to leave just before dawn so I’ll hit the maze during daylight going out and coming back. Although I’ve been on the river plenty of times before, so has everyone else, and if they’re getting lost, I can, too. Besides, the dogs can use a good rest, considering they didn’t get as much as they needed at Sheep Creek, what with teams going and coming and Yankee and Buck keeping everyone awake with their quarrel.

  As I settle in for the evening in the Yentna Station lodge, the leaders prepare to make the 75-mile dash back to Big Lake and glory—and a paycheck. They can’t leave until they finish their mandatory layovers (a total of 16 hours at any combination of checkpoints of the race), which means the front-runners will roll out shortly after midnight. With any luck, they’ll be across the finish line by nine or 10 tomorrow morning. I leave them to their race and collapse into one of the overstuffed chairs in the tiny sitting room/bar/dining room.

  As I half-doze, the lodge owner, Gary Gabryszak, is playing the guitar for the checkers and a radio reporter. He does “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and several other standards in a highly polished style. When someone asks him he admits he was a professional musician and worked with many well-known groups in the Lower 48 before he came to Alaska with his family some years ago.

  It’s no more surprising than running into John Denver or Jimmy Buffett in Talkeetna, which happened a few years back. As has often been said about Alaska, it may be a big place, but it’s a small world. You never know who you’ll meet out here.

  Monday—The Klondike 300: Yentna Station to Skwentna to Yentna Station (75 miles)

  I finally zonk out in a small bunk room in the lodge loft, oblivious to a host of aches and hurts and a painfully blistered frostbitten fingertip. After a sound sleep the checker wakes me up at five o’clock. I hope the dogs feel better than I do, but it’s time to get moving. Already I’ve spent 10 hours here, far longer than most of the stops I’ll make on the Iditarod.

  It’s only 30 below when I start hooking up at 5:30; first light is still a few hours away. We’re headed up river by six, the dogs running well in the moonless predawn dark on the deserted river. It’s Monday, and the weekend snowmachiners have long since returned to Anchorage; we’ll have the river completely to ourselves.

  Despite the lack of moonlight, I have no problem making out the river banks and even the trail itself. Lucky has been up front since we got down onto the Susitna River; having watched him unerringly choose the best trail for hours on end yesterday, I am content to run with my headlight off for the most part and let him lead us as he wishes.

  As the light slowly brightens behind us I have to switch dogs around a few times to keep the team lined out and running smoothly. This is part of the ongoing management of any dog team on a long run; sometimes dogs will tire or decide not to pull in a particular position. Conversely, some dogs will run faster than their neighbors—or the dogs in front of them—causing a rash of slack lines. For instance, if the swing dogs are too fast, a front-ender will often as not slow down just like a motorist backing off the gas to force a rude driver to pass.

  These anomalies become apparent in the form of drooping tuglines and ganglines and disruptions in the even pace of the team. Fixing them is analogous to a pilot continually fine-tuning an airplane engine, fiddling with the throttle and mixture to suit changing conditions such as temperature and altitude. Sometimes it seems half of the effort of keeping a team going on a long haul is successfully playing an endless head game with the dogs. They are, after all, only flesh and blood, and they get frisky or tired or even bored just like humans. And they can and will simply stop if they don’t feel like running any longer.

  The musher’s job is to stay ahead of this malaise. The best way is to keep the front end moving so the rest will follow. Sometimes this gets tricky and too many leaders can even be a bad thing. In practice, running two good leaders together on some trails doesn’t promote peaceful progress. All too often, two strong-minded front-enders won’t agree on where to run when faced with several equally good choices, such as on a river with a 100-foot-wide snowmachine highway.

  This can result in one leader yanking everyone over to the side he or she prefers, shortly followed by a jerk in the opposite direction as the other retaliates. It doesn’t help the team’s confidence to weave down the trail like a seasick snake, so one of the clashing canines has to go back in the team to restore harmony.

  A team takes a break on the Yentna River. Frequent short stops on boring river runs can help keep the dogs interested.

  One option to get around this problem is to go to a single leader, which is what I did yesterday because I had an odd number of dogs in the team after dropping Yankee. Lucky did quite well up front by himself, keeping his own pace and smoothly selecting the best trail from the maze of snowmachine tracks without having to drag a partner to one side or the other. Of course, there are drawbacks: single lead is a lot of work, and a single leader frequently sets a slower pace and tires more quickly than with a helpmate.

  Today, though, single lead isn’t an option because I’ve removed one of the gangline sections after dropping Buck; two blank spots isn’t a good idea in most circumstances because it strings everything out too much and makes for more difficult handling on tight trails.

  This morning Lucky is going well enough, but co-leader Maybelline seems to have gone a bit sour and isn’t her usual perky self. She’s slowing Lucky enough to allow the ever-eager swing dogs to overrun, causing even more of a slowdown as she turns to glare at the tailgaters behind her. It’s not a matter of a tired team—exactly the opposite. I’ve got to find the combination which keeps the energy flowing in a smooth and usable form. So, I juggle leaders and swing dogs until I get a lineup that works well.

  This is why a good roster of “go-dogs” or trail leaders is necessary. These are dogs who will run up front in lead or swing but aren’t always very good on commands. On trails with few distractions or turns they can frequently lead by
themselves, but more often they act as accelerators and pacers for the main leaders and perform an important function in keeping up the team’s speed.

  A good co-leader or swing dog can be just as critical as a super-smart power-steering leader on many stretches of trail. Fortunately, I’ve got four or five good front-enders in this category and I shuffle through them until I find one who runs well with Lucky. Maybelline is quite content to run in swing, where she pulls hard and now seems to be enjoying the run.

  Once we’re moving smoothly, I can relax a little and enjoy the trip up the river in the brightening dawn. The trail is impossible to miss in the daylight, even without formal race markers, and whenever there is a choice Lucky makes the proper selection without a word from me. Of course, the team’s speed drops off once the sun comes up and we trundle along at our customary seven or eight miles an hour; this isn’t going to win any races but it’s more than acceptable under the circumstances. It just means an extra hour or so on a 30-or 40-mile run, but at least I won’t have to worry about getting lost.

  About five miles short of Skwentna, just about where my last year’s Iditarod team stalled for several hours on the first night of the race, I notice a team heading toward us. I remark to myself they’re moving quite well, and then I see why: there’s no driver aboard the sled. I have to try to stop them; it’s a primary rule of mushing, not to mention common courtesy and good sense. However, we’re closing at almost 20 miles an hour, so I’ll only have one shot to grab them. If I miss, there’s no one behind me for four or five hours.

  I yell for Lucky to whoa up, and the team stops quickly as if they understand what’s happening. I manage to get my snow hook into the crust but I know it won’t hold long as I leap off my sled and jump into the path of the oncoming team. The fast-moving leaders shy away from me but I manage to clamber aboard the sled.