We’re all planning to leave around mid-afternoon for the 32-mile run over Rainy Pass to Rohn. Sketchy reports from up ahead indicate the infamous Dalzell Gorge is actually in reasonably good shape this year and no one seems to have had any real trouble. I’m looking forward to the run, even though I’ll have to do the Gorge itself after dark.
Before I rest, I stop into the lodge for a proper lunch; I did this last year after I’d scratched, but I think the food tastes a lot better this time around. As I eat I catch up on the race scuttlebutt: as everyone feared, Rick Swenson has been withdrawn from the race. In fact, he’s here at Rainy Pass and the ski-equipped Beaver to pick up his dogs and sled is already enroute.
When I meander down to my team Rick is standing nearby. I go over and offer my condolences and we talk for a few minutes. I assure him we’re all behind him and hope this can be worked out somehow. He’s understandably depressed and says he won’t be back next year. He’s already posted a sign in the lodge advertising his team for sale.
He says he doubts many of the other Big Names will return next year if the rule stands. He argues that not many people will invest up to $50,000 to build a world-class team which might be tossed out of the Iditarod on what amounts to an random act of chance. There are other races, he points out, and if the Iditarod doesn’t get its act straight it will be eclipsed sooner rather than later.
I sympathize with him. I left the race here last year myself, but for decidedly less controversial reasons. As someone has said, he is now a bonafide martyr to the cause, for all the good that does him at the moment. I go back to my team hoping he’ll reconsider and return next year. He has become a central symbol of the Iditarod, a role model for hundreds of mushers like me who will likely never even place in the top 20, much less win the race five times. I lie down for a nap with some misgivings about the future of the Iditarod if it can’t heal the grievous rift it has opened with Rick and all of us who support him.
After a most refreshing doze in the sun we’re all up and getting ready by three or so. On one side is Linda Joy, a 42-year-old grandmother who runs the dog tours at a bed and breakfast just down the road from me at Montana Creek. She’s been carefully planning and preparing to run the race for three years and seems to be enjoying things so far—with the exception of a close encounter of the worst kind with a tree back around Happy River. The right side of her face looks like she lost a fight with a berserk cement mixer, complete with a black eye the size of a dessert plate. Nonetheless, she’s cheerful and doesn’t wince too much when we hang her new nickname on her: Dances With Trees.
On the other side is Lisa Moore from Fairbanks, who lived many years in Nome and went to school there. She scratched in Koyuk in 1994 and, like me, has a demon of her own to exorcise. She was the last-place musher struggling down the Yukon whom I watched at Galena that year as the northern lights danced over the Brooks Range. Her mother ran the Iditarod in 1980. When Lisa finishes (she emphatically points out it’s ‘when,’ not ‘if’) they’ll be the first mother and daughter to have raced.
Andy Sterns from Fairbanks is also running back with us. He scratched literally at the gates of Nome last year when a terrific storm pinned him down. Race Marshal Bobby Lee drove out to find Andy after Max Hall, who was traveling just ahead of him, barely made it into town. By the time Bobby found Andy, two of his dogs were becoming hypothermic and Andy didn’t see any way to save them except by putting them into Bobby’s truck, which meant scratching.
Three teams work their way up onto the windswept tundra after leaving the Rainy Pass checkpoint on Puntilla Lake. The summit of Rainy Pass itself is 20 miles ahead and almost 2,000 feet higher.
Andy’s was by far the closest scratch to the finish line, barely three miles from Front Street. He has a crackerjack team this year and can afford to wait in the checkpoints and make fast dashes up the trail. His team is several miles an hour faster than mine, and he could probably run in the top 20 if he pushed the issue. He, too, is chasing a ghost, except he’ll have to wait 1,000 miles to finally put his to rest.
So far we’re not traveling together, but we seem to keep running into each other at checkpoints and are generally keeping to similar schedules. I’m out before most of the others at 4:30; they’ll probably pass my slowpokes before we reach the summit of Rainy Pass, a 20-mile, 1,500-foot climb, all on a windswept trail well above timberline.
As Socks leads us out of the checkpoint and onto the outbound trail, I quietly put a stake through the heart of my last demon. Last year I watched these same trail markers being pulled up as my hasty decision to scratch began its corrosive yearlong attack on my resolve and self-confidence. I silently thank Socks for getting me past my own failings in a more than symbolic way.
Now we’re on fresh ground and I can run the race for its own sake. The trail will be far from easy, and I’m sure I’ll have low points I can’t even imagine, but I’m running on my terms now, and those terms are very simple: don’t quit, no matter what. I know now I’ve got a solid team; we may not go fast, but we go, and I’ve promised myself I’ll stand on the runners forever if that’s what it takes to get to Nome.
This commitment has become very real to me; I remind myself of it whenever I start to feel we’re going too slowly, or whenever a faster team passes me. I’m continually fighting a mental battle to make sure I’m not the team’s limiting factor. I’m finally starting to have complete faith in my team, the team I’ve trained all winter and which I’m becoming more and more certain will get me to Nome.
The first part of our climb into what is for me a truly new world is a gradual pull up the eastern approaches of two-mile-wide Ptarmigan Pass. It is substantially lower than Rainy but makes a great 70-mile loop to the south before reaching Rohn. Rainy Pass is actually a subsidiary but more direct pass cutting across the loop of Ptarmigan. The race has been run through Ptarmigan once or twice in the past when the Dalzell Gorge was too dangerous.
This year, in fact, the annual Iron Dog snowmachine race from Big Lake to Nome and back (two weeks before the Iditarod) used Ptarmigan on the way out. The motor mushers ran into overflow on the South Fork of the Kuskokwim River bad enough to completely engulf a couple of their machines. The surviving teams returned from Nome via Rainy Pass but had an extremely difficult time powering up through the Gorge. However, they broke a good trail for the Iditarod in the process, and our trailbreakers have apparently improved it even more.
Within a mile after leaving Puntilla we are crawling steadily upward across the bleak, interminable rolling tundra. Because the wind has swept away most traces of the trail, as it always does up here, the track is permanently marked every few hundred yards with crude six-foot-high wooden tripods. Anything less substantial would never withstand the ever-present wind, and would not be visible when the gale whips up ground blizzards thick enough to obscure the team in front of the sled even while leaving perfect visibility at eye level.
Today the scenery is magnificent in the rich afternoon light as we work our way toward the branch canyon leading to Rainy Pass. We’re in the heart of the Alaska Range; ridges on both sides tower to 6,000 feet or more. Fifteen miles to the north, and visible up every side valley, are the breathtaking granite pinnacles of the Cathedral Spires, their sheer rock walls rising as much as a mile above the glaciers at their feet. Mount McKinley—Denali—is more than 80 miles northeast, but its skyscraping 20,000-foot height lets us catch a glimpse or two of it and its 17,000-foot neighbor Mount Foraker despite the intervening terrain.
I’ve flown this route more times than I can count, at all altitudes and in all flavors of weather. I recognize the landmarks and know exactly where I am from a purely geographical standpoint, but being here on the ground is a totally different reality. There is something much more three-dimensional about surface travel, looking up at the mountains which lose much of their impact from the cockpit of an airplane. And the trail is far from the direct route afforded by a plane, varying from mile to mile and even step t
o step in a way the pilot can never experience.
The barren, often windswept summit of Rainy Pass in the Alaska Range is more than 3,000 feet above sea level, the highest point on the race.
As the shadows of the ridges creep over the valley through which we are running, the dogs pull steadily up into the pass. After we leave the open tundra, we follow a stream bed for a few miles, and then skirt a small lake. Parts of the trail are over open rocks the size of bowling balls; there may have been snow covering them for earlier mushers, but there’s nothing now but raw stone.
Finally we shoot straight up a forbidding slope. After 15 steep minutes, most of which sees me walking beside the sled or even pushing it, we crest the pass. I can’t help but be reminded of our crowning climb in the Copper Basin last year. Now as then, I stop the team for a brief rest and a survey of our hard-won domain.
It’s just past sunset. To the west, the series of rugged ridges descending to the broad Kuskokwim Valley is suffused with luminous golden backlight from the just-vanished sun. The mountaintops on either side and behind me are a radiant violet in the alpenglow. The full moon is already up in the east, a robust globe of weathered ivory hovering over the snow-mantled peaks.
There is no wind, and the absolute silence is broken only by the quiet breathing of the dogs. We are the only living creatures in this elemental universe of light and sky and snow and rock and shadow. In a journey laden with too many hours of work, pain, anxiety, and discouragement, this is one of the treasured rewards, one of the jewels beyond price which makes distance mushing in general, and the Iditarod in particular, worth all the sweat and worry.
However, it’s all downhill from here, and that means my Light Brigade must now charge into the Valley of Death, culminating in the Dalzell Gorge. With some trepidation I give Socks the okay and we plummet down the open snowfield toward the Pass Fork valley, which will join Dalzell Creek in a couple of miles. After that, it’s only a few miles through the Gorge, then five easy miles to the haven of the checkpoint cabin at Rohn.
Enough light remains for me to get the lay of the land as we careen into the narrowing valley and cross the timberline (in this case, more properly the brush line). This proves fortuitous because the steeply descending trail down Pass Fork turns out to be a nasty piece of work.
There isn’t enough snow for my brake to be really effective and all I can do is dig it in hard when we’re crossing a patch of crusty snow or even bare dirt. The trail twists and turns through narrow rocky ravines and across half-collapsed ice bridges over Pass Fork itself, mercifully only a few inches deep in most places. At one point an avalanche has partially blocked the canyon; the trail plows directly up and across the jumble of hardened snow and rocks.
In the deepening dusk I’m worried I’ll miss something and wreck. The dogs are full of energy and charge on as I brake and swerve and lean behind them. Despite the cool temperatures and downhill run I’m soaked in sweat from manhandling the sled. We bang more than a few rocks and sideswipe more trailside willow bushes than I can count.
Eventually the trail begins to level out as we merge with the main valley of Dalzell Creek. The gorge is still a few miles ahead and we’ve got some fairly straight and level running between here and there. At one point the marked trail makes an abrupt detour for no apparent reason. By the time we bounce up and over a bank and through the hinterland and rejoin the beaten path, I’m convinced the trailbreakers were imbibing something stronger than coffee.
Not too much farther on, the trail makes another excursion 100 feet or more directly up the south wall of the valley. We then run along a wooded, ever-narrowing bench hung on the side of the mountain for a half-mile until I see another of the now-infamous yellow warning signs: “Dangerous Trail Conditions Ahead.” This is the Dalzell Gorge.
The Dalzell Gorge is one of the most infamous stretches on the entire Iditarod. The original trail high on the slope above the canyon is unusable, and the race now runs through the very bottom of the gorge. There is always open water and treacherous ice and more than a few mushers come to grief here every year.
Based on advice from race veterans, I stop the team at the top of the precipice and disconnect four tuglines in the rear of the team. I don’t want too much power for the maze we’re about to enter. After all, it’s mostly downhill and excess energy can only be dissipated in unhealthy ways, of which the Gorge provides more than enough.
With a deep breath and a transfusion of Tums, I give Socks an “Easy, easy, easy!” which he interprets as a green light for the Indianapolis 500. Thankful I’ve disabled at least four cylinders of my supercharged motor, I hang on for dear life as we surge into the abyss.
The grand entrance to the Gorge is a plummeting descent of 200 feet that seems like 1,000. It takes every bit of my strength to keep the brake stomped into the churned-up trail. Even so the dogs reach a dangerous velocity before the bottom and it’s all I can do to keep the sled upright. Suddenly the trail flattens out and we’re moving along an eerily quiet, shadowy, forested tunnel.
I can sense we’re in a deep cleft in the mountains. The moonlight doesn’t reach this far down so I can only probe upward occasionally with my headlight to glimpse the rock walls looming overhead in the darkness. The narrow valley floor is a maze of huge spruce trees, seemingly far too large for this part of Alaska. As we work our way deeper into the canyon, it seems ominously like a page lifted directly from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, one of his dank mountain chasms inhabited by goblins and orcs and other things I don’t want to think about.
Shortly I can also hear water rushing very close by—too much water for my peace of mind. I know Dalzell Creek is open in many places but the trail is allegedly dry, provided I can stay on it. It’s small comfort, given everything I’ve heard about this place.
Soon enough the trail begins to jump back and forth across the stream on ice bridges not much wider than the sled. The creek bed is marked by collapsed ice ledges and holes which must go down six or eight feet, with flowing water at the bottom. I’ve been told the water isn’t more than a foot or so deep, but I don’t think anyone could easily recover from a plunge into one of the icy pits yawning a few feet beyond the shoulder of the trail.
In some places we squeeze between giant spruce sentinels and the caved-in ice of the creek, while in others rock walls brush my shoulders. Fortunately the trail is in excellent shape. If anything, it’s too good and the dogs want to go too fast. As we veer through the darkness I feel even better about disconnecting four of my horses.
Quickly I develop a rhythm for swinging around the tight curves and lining up the sled for the right-angled swerves across the ice bridges. I ride the brake almost continuously and learn to play it like a well-tuned piano. After awhile I seem to merge with the sled, intuitively leaning and braking and accelerating. I’m thankful for the flexibility of the Willis sled, which gives me a welcome extra measure of control and confidence.
It’s a nonstop exercise in sled handling which doesn’t allow a second’s lapse in attention. I don’t have time to cast more than a glance up at the huge cliffs which in places crowd the creek through gaps no more than 30 or 40 feet wide. I see enough, though, to form the subconscious opinion this place might be a surpassingly beautiful getaway in the summer, if there were any way to get here.
I know the Gorge is only a couple of miles long, but it seems like all night before we debouch suddenly onto the frozen moonlit expanse of the Tatina River. Rohn is only five miles away over a speedway trail down the river ice. I stop the sled and stand there for a full five minutes shaking with relief. Nothing in my training or any of the mid-distance races I’ve run could have prepared me for what I’ve just been through. It’s simply something I had to experience for myself.
The five-mile run down the Tatina River from the Dalzell Gorge to Rohn Roadhouse is one of the most beautiful of the race.
The Gorge has actually been very benevolent, but still I feel as if I’ve skirted disaster by t
he narrowest of margins. Without question it’s been the most precise and professional—and ultimately satisfying—job of sled driving I’ve ever done, and as I calm down I start to feel moderately pleased with myself and the team.
Socks in particular has been rock-steady up front all the way through, never going too fast but always keeping up enough speed to give me steering way. Self-congratulations aside, I’m not in any mood to go back and try it again. Right now all I want to do is get on into Rohn and take a well-deserved rest.
We arrive at Rohn half an hour later in high spirits. As we pull down the tree-lined runway to the checkpoint I remember the last time I was here, in 1994 with my big Cessna. In six trips I flew in 45 bales of straw for the race, using wheels to land on the icy, sloping 1,200-foot-long runway because there wasn’t quite enough snow to use skis. Every landing was an adventure of its own, although not quite on a par with what I’ve just come through.
Teams must run alongside the narrow, snow-covered ski runway at Rohn before pulling into the checkpoint. Winds often make this runway treacherous for Iditarod Air Force pilots.
Quickly we stop in front of the old trapper’s cabin nestled deep in the spruce forest which has served as the checkpoint since the first Iditarod. I find to my pleasure the checker is my friend Jasper Bond, whom I flew from one end of the race to the other in 1992 on his first visit to Alaska. A self-employed potter from Minnesota who unabashedly describes himself as a mushing groupie, he seems to have found his ultimate calling in the Iditarod.
He’s rapidly become a checker, a responsibility normally reserved for veteran Iditarod mushers. Moreover, he’s become one of the best in the business; his checkpoints are well organized and as musher-friendly as often-austere conditions permit, just what tired drivers need after something like Rainy Pass and the Dalzell.
Alaska Dogs and Iditarod Mushers Page 35