Soon the sun sinks below the horizon in a glorious explosion of crimson, orange and blue. Out here on the Burn the sky is so huge the effect is overwhelming. Just after dusk, as we cruise across the flats on a hard, fast trail, I see a dark shape dart onto the trail ahead and then, seeing us, flee back to a safe distance.
It is a very healthy fox which has been scavenging for scraps where mushers have been feeding their teams along the trail. It stays perhaps a hundred yards off the trail and parallels us for almost a mile, hoping for a handout. When we continue, it stops and looks wistfully after us before returning to its vigil for the next team.
In the gathering dusk the team speeds up to 10 miles an hour, a breakneck pace for my Clydesdales. Lisa and I swap the lead every five miles or so as we reel off the miles to Nikolai. Except for a stretch of semi-frozen overflow and a small open creek or two, the trail stays good and the evening is ideal for running.
I vividly recall a particular training run at Montana Creek where I imagined cruising on the far side of the Alaska Range. Tonight is the perfect fulfillment of that vision: the brilliant evening star ahead, the moon rising over the Alaska Range behind me, the twin colossi of Denali and Foraker glowing softly in the last of the alpenglow over my shoulder—and Nome somewhere under the western horizon, much closer than it’s ever been for me before.
The Farewell Burn was the scene of Alaska’s largest forest fire in the summer of 1978. Almost 20 years later much of it is still desolate wasteland. This can be a very treacherous stretch of trail when the wind blows and snow begins to drift. Here Lisa Moore pauses her team ahead of the author’s.
Eventually I drop behind to realign some dogs and arrive in Nikolai not long after midnight. We’ve been on the trail more than 14 hours straight but we’ve pulled through in relatively good shape. Still, the team deserves a rest and the sled needs repairs. I’ve sent out plenty of food and I decide to take my 24-hour layover here instead of in McGrath as I’d planned.
I’ve got plenty of company: eight or ten teams are here finishing up their layovers. Nikolai has become a popular place to rest over the past few years because of its friendly atmosphere and relative quiet compared to the usual media circus in McGrath, 50 miles further on.
After I take care of the dogs I amble down to the checkpoint to see how the race is going. The computer printouts faxed from race headquarters show the leaders are already more than 100 miles ahead, pushing from Ophir to Ruby over what is apparently a horrible trail. Moreover, they’ve all taken their 24-hour layovers, so we back-of-the-packers are really much farther behind than the mileage would indicate. But this isn’t a problem: the leaders are racing for a paycheck; all we want to do is finish, hopefully in decent time. After all, getting there is supposed to be half the fun.
While I make a sandwich in the checkpoint cabin I marvel at the race communications network provided by GCI, one of Alaska’s competing long-distance companies. Every checkpoint has a fax and phone, replacing the ham radio nets of early races. At villages like Nikolai, modern satellite-based phone service has been available for a decade or more, so faxes are nothing new.
At remote checkpoints satellite dishes were flown in along with generators and enough communications gear to make the Pentagon proud. Cripple, which is nothing more than a couple of tents somewhere along the Innoko River at the halfway point of the race, even sports a video phone link back to the race headquarters in Anchorage; of course, it probably will be dismantled by the time we rear-enders get there in a few days.
One nice spin-off for ordinary drivers is people can call from anywhere in the world to race central and have a message faxed to mushers along the trail. Here in Nikolai I find half a dozen messages of encouragement from my family and friends; they’re a real boost and remind me someone is watching no matter how lonely it gets. I’m especially surprised by a message from my sister Ann in New Mexico; it seems I have quite a cult following there and I’m responsible for a significant jump in Internet usage as they hit the Iditarod home page.
Finally I stagger over to the village public works building about five a.m. and hang my parka, overalls, and boots next to the boiler to dry out. Then it’s up to the storage room on the second floor where zonked-out mushers are sprawled everywhere, scattered among boxes, parts bins, and discarded furniture. I find a comfy-looking piece of foam padding and collapse for my first real sleep since several days before the race began, about a million years ago.
March 7. 1996—The Iditarod: 24-hour layover at Nikolai
After a solid rest, I’m up at mid-morning to see to the dogs. Hot water is available in the village washateria located in one end of the municipal office building; this makes feeding the dogs much easier and means we don’t have to fire up our alcohol cookers to heat the water.
While the dog food soaks next to the thumping washing machines I head upstairs to the village community center on the second floor. A tiny restaurant occupies a large serving window with three or four stools at one end of the large room; it hasn’t been open long and the owners are trying to eke out some extra income.
Checkpoints, like Nikolai, offer a chance for teams and drivers to rest and recover. Dogs quickly learn to appreciate the straw and respite from rigors of the trail.
Nikolai is an Athabaskan Indian village of barely 200 people. As in most remote Alaskan Native settlements cash is a scarce commodity, especially in the winter. The Iditarod represents a major boost to the local subsistence-based economy. I’m more than happy to contribute my share for a plate of sausage, eggs, and pancakes.
While I’m eating I get into a discussion with the city administrator, who is white and lives most of the time in Anchorage. He tells me this isn’t an unusual situation for Bush villages. Part of his job is also to secure grants and other financial aid for the village, and this requires experience and connections not readily available from local sources.
For his part, the administrator is as staunch a partisan of the village as any of the locals, and he genuinely seems to understand their unique needs and issues. It seems like a typically practical Alaskan solution to an otherwise intractable problem. As I head out to feed the dogs a camera crew asks if they can do an interview. They’re from Channel 13 in Anchorage, which is teaming up with the cable-based Outdoor Channel for what should be exceptionally good coverage of the race. They have made a promise to cover the tail-enders in addition to the front-runners, a decision I find very refreshing. I’m just surprised to find myself the tail-ender in front of the camera.
For the better part of an hour they follow me around as I feed the dogs, work on the sled, and muse about the Iditarod and life in general. For me it’s quite the bully pulpit, even though I know they’ll probably throw out 90% of the tape.
Lisa Moore comes over and together we explain exactly why we’re doing this: to finish, period. I’m not sure the reporter has encountered this approach to the race—no money, no glory, just the chance for a run down Front Street and the official finisher’s belt buckle.
Lisa probably puts it best: our race is a series of obstacles. We get past the obstacle at hand and then go to work on the next one, which may be only 20 yards down the trail. We run the race one problem at a time, and sooner or later we’ll get past the last one and finish in Nome. We may ultimately get beaten by forces beyond our control, but we’ll never give up without a hell of a fight. This is the paramount lesson we’ve all learned in our various paths to this year’s race.
I hope the message translates in the instant-gratification, winner-take-all frenzy pervading the media these days. I’m afraid we back-of-the-packers are hopelessly old-fashioned. Maybe we’d have made good nineteenth-century pioneers, battling our way West with our covered wagons to the promised land beyond the horizon. In any case, I doubt Nike or any of the other big sports advertisers will be beating down our doors to be their spokespersons.
March 8, 1996—The Iditarod: Nikolai to McGrath (48 miles); McGrath to Takotna (23 miles); Takotna t
o Ophir (38 miles)
The remainder of my stay in Nikolai is blessedly uneventful, divided between feeding dogs and sleeping. My official layover is completed about one a.m.; the dogs are ready to go after their rest and we’re on the trail to McGrath within minutes.
We make good time, at least by our modest standards, but the run to McGrath is downright boring. The endless oxbows in the broad Kuskokwim River blend into one another and I repeatedly nod off on the back of the sled. Again, I’ve flown this area many times but down here on the river I might as well be on another planet as I watch bend after bend slowly unfold in front of me.
As the sun comes up I know we’re at least in the general vicinity of McGrath because I recognize a couple of distinctive hills. However, it’s three more long hours before we finally pull around the last tree line to see the town sprawled out along the high river bank.
As soon as we’re into the checkpoint and the dogs are taken care of, I drop Bea. She hasn’t been pulling since the beginning of the race and I have finally given up hope she will toughen up on the trail. I evidently made a mistake bringing her; she had foot problems all winter and ran far fewer miles than the other dogs. With 20-20 hindsight, I wish I’d brought one of my other seasoned veterans, but there’s not much I can do now.
A team leaves McGrath, whose main street is the airport parking ramp. The town is a major staging point for the Iditarod logistics effort. Everything for the remote checkpoints at Rohn, Ophir, Cripple, and Iditarod is flown from here by the Iditarod Air Force. Many mushers take their 24-hour layovers at McGrath because of its good facilities.
I spend only a few hours in McGrath, just long enough to feed the dogs and make a quick trip to the local hardware store for more hose clamps to finish fixing the sled. In previous years when I was flying for the race McGrath was one of our major bases and I know the town well.
Founded in 1907 as a steamboat landing to serve the Ophir gold district, it assumed its current identity when the Army built an air base here just before World War II. Even today main street for the town’s 500 people is the airport parking ramp. Among other things McGrath has the only bar for 200 miles in any direction—McGuire’s, right next to the airplanes along with two grocery stores, hardware store, roadhouse/restaurant, airline terminal, flight service station, and local public radio station, KSKO-AM. The radio station is the only one for about the same radius as the bar and is a favorite information source for mushers on the trail.
As much as I’d like to grab a quick brew at McGuire’s ($3.00 per can and you have to put up with the bartender’s atrocious jokes), I have to get moving. I hope to be in Ophir tonight, almost 60 miles up the trail. We roll out of the checkpoint and across the Kuskokwim and are on the 20-mile trail to Takotna a little past noon. I’m running during the heat of the day again, but I don’t have much choice.
I soon discover this relatively short haul involves a nonstop climb up a long ridge before it drops abruptly down to Takotna. It takes forever for the dogs to pull up the endless slope over a million moguls created by fast-moving snowmachines. There is nothing more frustrating for a dog team than an uphill trail with two- and three-foot moguls. The dogs can’t get up enough speed to pull cleanly over the tops of the bumps, resulting in a nauseating pull-drop-slam-stop rhythm which causes the team to work twice as hard as on a smooth trail.
Even the expansive view as we creep along the top of the ridge can’t make up for the drudgery. The dogs are much relieved when we finally roar down the 500-foot hill to the river for the last couple of miles up to the town. By the time we pull to a stop in front of the tiny town’s combination community center and school it’s taken us almost four hours; most other teams have done it in three or less. I’m going to have to get used to spending a lot more time on the runners than everyone else, but as long as the dogs keep moving, so will I.
My plan is to change my runner plastic here, snack the dogs, and move on to Ophir. Changing the plastic normally takes 10 minutes, but as I rip off the scarred bottoms that have withstood everything since Fourth Avenue I find a hidden legacy of the Post River collision: the heads have popped off four of the retaining screws on the metal guides which hold the plastic. I can’t get the new plastic back on without re-anchoring the metal to the wooden runner.
This is well beyond the capability of my minimal trail tool kit. Fortunately the checker finds a power drill and we string an extension cord from the community center to the sled, across the village’s main street. I carefully countersink new holes and reattach the metal with drywall screws which have magically materialized from someone’s garage. It takes two hours to do everything properly. I’m glad I didn’t wait to change the plastic at Ophir, a true ghost town where I’d be strictly out of luck.
I’m finally ready to move out just after sunset on the 38-mile run to Ophir, which the checker assures me is actually closer to 30. Just before I pull the hook, Rich Bosela, who finished the race a few years ago, comes back into town with apparently ill dogs.
They could have eaten spoiled meat; the recent warm weather has partly thawed some of the meat in the food bags and I’ve heard several reports of sick dogs. I’ve carefully avoided feeding my team anything that even appears to have melted and so far haven’t had any problems. I hope Rich can get everything squared away and get moving again; he’s a charter member of the back-of-the-pack group and has been good company.
The one-lane gravel road from Takotna to Ophir was built in the 1920s to connect the mines in the rich Innoko mining district to a steamboat landing on the Kuskokwim River. Although isolated from the state’s highway network, it is still maintained for vehicles during the summer—at least as far as this “State Maintenance Ends” sign, a mile or so short of the Ophir
The trail to Ophir follows an old road built back in the 1920s to connect the mining district to a steamboat landing on the Kuskokwim River. Barges have replaced the steamboats and several of the mines are still active, so the state maintains the road. It’s not connected to the rest of the state road system and isn’t plowed over to Ophir in the winter, but it’s just fine for dog teams and snowmachines.
The first thing we encounter on leaving Takotna is a brutal eight-mile grade up to the pass leading to the Innoko River and Ophir. The climb is all on the road but that doesn’t make the 1,000-foot ascent any less difficult. The dogs pull steadily up the slope as light snow starts to fall. I’m thankful my team includes more big dogs than most; they may be slow, but they provide solid pulling power for hills like this.
Once at the top we start down Independence Creek and into the heart of the old mining district. I’ve heard the view is spectacular during the day, but with the darkness and the snow my horizon is no farther than my headlight can shine. We make reasonably good time down the long grade to the upper Innoko River valley. The snow continues to fall, not heavily but enough to obstruct vision and force me to put on my ski goggles.
At the bottom of the hill the road crosses Independence Creek on a bridge. The bridge is fine but the approaches are wiped out by overflow. This is the first serious overflow the dogs have had to actually negotiate and Pullman, who is spelling Socks for awhile, does her best to tiptoe around it, to no avail. It’s only an inch or two deep but it’s 50 feet across and looks ugly; finally I urge her through it and across the bridge.
I have a sinking feeling we’ll see a lot more of this and I’m soon proved correct. Every bridge for the next 15 miles (and there are more than a few) is preceded or followed by stretches of overflow of varying severity, usually less than an inch of water over slick ice. Pullman gradually learns to find her way through these situations, which I’m glad to see.
Fortunately none of what we’re encountering approaches the heavy-duty flooding we were able to bypass back on the Yentna. On the other hand, we don’t have much choice but to splash through this stuff, which the dogs most assuredly do not like. Regardless, we have to adapt as best we can because the trail from Ophir to Cripple and up to
Ruby is supposed to have more water on it than the Everglades. It may well be sink or swim if we want to get to the Yukon.
We finally pull into Ophir just before midnight. We’ve taken a little more than four hours to come the 30 or so miles from Takotna; everyone else has done it in two or three. It’s been almost 24 hours since we left Nikolai, slightly more than 100 miles ago. We’ve spent 18 hours actually on the trail, considerably more than anyone else for this stretch.
It’s another measure of just how slow my guys are. I wonder what it must be like for the leaders to cruise between checkpoints at 12 miles an hour or better. But then, we’re still moving, and that in itself is a major improvement over last year.
The powdery snow continues to fall while I work with the dogs in the checkpoint. The white stuff will be a help on the trail later because it’s only a thin coating and will cushion the rock-hard ice underneath for the dogs. Hard, fast trails are nice, but they can take a toll on the delicate bones and ligaments in the dogs’ wrists.
This 1930s miner’s cabin on the summer-only road from Takotna to Ophir is now used only seasonally. Venerable cabins, buildings, and mine works from Alaska’s pre-airplane days can be found along many of the state’s trails and old mining roads.
We usually remedy these carpal aches and pains with neoprene wraparound sweats during rest periods, but sometimes inflammation persists and the dog must be dropped. So far only Socks has had problems of this nature but I’ve carefully put on his leg sweats at every stop and he’s doing fine. He acts his age whenever we get ready to leave a checkpoint but is always trotting happily within a mile or so. Like my other Iditarod veterans, he’s a trouper and would rather push on up the trail than get left behind.
Alaska Dogs and Iditarod Mushers Page 37