Alaska Dogs and Iditarod Mushers

by Mike Dillingham

  In the meantime the snow is merely a nuisance as it sifts into everything including the sled bag despite my best efforts to keep it out. I finally get the dogs settled and drag over to the classic 1930-vintage miner’s cabin which has been the checkpoint here for decades. It’s hard to believe there were more than 1,000 people living here during the boom days of 1907; now Dick and Audra Forsgren’s cabin is one of only a couple of buildings left standing.

  The cabin has always been one of my favorite places on the race, at least when I was flying. Now it’s full of people and I have to go find a place to sleep in the “Dodge Lodge” out back, a quonset-type tent with an oil heater and straw on the floor which is being used for extra bunk space. I wake up in half an hour shivering uncontrollably and stumble back into the cabin, where I stretch out on bare floor next to the wood stove. I don’t sleep well thinking about the ugly trail we must face when it gets light.

  March 9-10, 1996—The Iditarod: Ophir to Cripple (about 45 miles); Cripple to Ruby (about 125 miles)

  Because of a widespread midwinter thaw, the entire Innoko River valley, which the trail traverses, has become a semiliquid morass. Skiplanes have not been able to land at any of the spots along the Innoko River where the Cripple checkpoint is usually set up. A skeleton checkpoint called Cripple was finally established, but no one is exactly certain of its location, other than it’s not quite as far down the trail as Cripple normally is.

  As a result of the access problems, the race manager decided to have all the food we intended for Cripple shipped to Ophir instead. Every musher planned a major replenishment of food supplies at Cripple, the jump off point for the longest and arguably most difficult leg of the race. Now we must haul all of our food from Ophir for both the leg to Cripple and the continuation to Ruby, more than 170 miles in all.

  Even for the fastest teams this will result in more than 24 hours total time between food drops, which means at least three meals plus snacks for the dogs. Considering the dogs will eat a pound or two of food at every feeding, and snacks will add another couple of pounds, the front-runners must provision themselves with an extra 50 pounds of food or so.

  For slow teams like mine, the on-our-own time may be more than 36 hours, and accordingly I manage to stuff almost 80 pounds of food into, on, and around my sled. To accomplish this feat of legerdemain I toss out all of the junk I should have left at home in the first place; I surprise myself at how much room can be made in a sled bag when the need arises.

  I also decide to drop Batman. He’s had an open sore on one of his front foot pads since before the race and even with booties and lots of ointment, it’s not improving. He’s game to go on but I’d just as soon not expose him to what I fear is coming between here and Ruby.

  He’s a big guy and I don’t want to carry him in the basket. Besides, he’s done his part to get us this far and deserves a rest and a trip home. This leaves me with 13 dogs, more than enough to get me to Nome. After all, Ron Aldrich said he actually started the race with 12 dogs one year and had no trouble making it all the way.

  The old miner’s cabin at Ophir, owned by Dick and Audra Forsgren, dates to the 1930s. One of the two surviving buildings in Ophir, it has been the checkpoint here since the first Iditarod.

  As I get ready to leave, the checker says the trailbreakers had to build 17 bridges across open streams on this portion of the trail, and there are many dozen more places where the trail traverses overflow. Apparently the piece de resistance of this wilderness construction effort is a crossing of the Innoko River 10 miles before Cripple. The checker warns me to be very careful not to get off the narrow built-up path on this makeshift bridge or risk going swimming in flowing water at least two feet deep.

  The only good news is it’s been cold at night and some of the overflow has frozen up, although other spots have reportedly opened. Any way I look at it, it’s going to be a hellaciously bad trail, hard ice where the recent thaw and freeze has glazed the snow, punctuated by stretches of slush or open water.

  I’ve heard the trail has been especially hard on some of the front-runners and they’ve had to drop more dogs than expected at both Cripple and Ruby. DeeDee Jonrowe supposedly had to carry a dog in the basket for 100 miles; this can’t have helped her chances for a top finish. This convinces me to keep my dogs well under control, since I’m hoping to keep as many as I can all the way to Nome.

  I urge the team out onto the trail with no small amount of trepidation. As we leave the comforting security of the checkpoint behind I wonder what shape we’ll be in when we finally reach Ruby, which for the moment seems impossibly far away. For the first 15 miles the trail is deceptively good. We make excellent time in the cool morning air and I begin to think this has all been much overrated.

  Then we start to hit the overflow. Every sidehill and stream crossing offers its own little version of misery. The dogs can tiptoe around the edges of some of them, although the sled still plunges through the middle like a water ride at Disney World. In other places the team resembles Miss Budweiser leaving a rooster tail of spray as 50-odd paws splash through the slush.

  Even where the overflow is frozen it is often fractured into shards of ice like a department store window after a street riot. The dogs somehow pick their way through the debris with the aplomb of fakirs crossing beds of hot coals. I stop the team after the worst mine fields, expecting to see shredded booties and blood on the ice, but instead am constantly amazed at what Will Barron calls the dogs’ “craftiness” in avoiding injury. I finally yield to the dogs’ better judgment and let them do their own thing. They’ll get us through if I just trust them and keep them headed down the right trail.

  We pound on through the morning and into the afternoon. The few drivers who trailed me out of Ophir pass me; one of them says Rich Bosela scratched at Takotna, which means I have officially become the last racer on the trail. I’ve finally drifted all the way to the back of the pack.

  About noon I notice what I first take to be a team on the trail ahead of us. As we draw slowly closer I see it’s someone pedaling a trail bike with ATV-sized tires. I think I might be hallucinating but a sharp slap from an overhanging spruce branch convinces me I’m fully awake.

  I haven’t the faintest idea what the intrepid cyclist is doing out here in the middle of God’s own nowhere, although he wouldn’t be the first adventurer to try the Iditarod via something other than dog sled or snowmachine. Flying for the race I’ve seen cross-country skiers and even hikers on showshoes trailing the dogs, but a bicycle this far out in the wilderness is something new.

  This only seems to fit the increasingly weird atmosphere which seems to permeate this stretch of trail. The worst part is the biker is actually going as fast as my dogs much of the time. He finally stops; I try to make conversation with our improbable fellow traveler but discover he’s apparently from some Germanic-speaking country and doesn’t seem to understand English. My attempts at fractured Spanish and Russian don’t get anywhere either so we end up waving at each other in primitive sign language. Finally I figure out he wants to follow me. The dogs don’t know what to make of this apparition and I have to lead them around it. I swing back onto the runners with a wave and we push off down the trail at what I consider a good pace. I turn to look back and see he’s easily keeping up with us, maybe 50 yards behind. I suppose Martin or Doug or DeeDee might be able to outrun this contraption, but my pack mules insist on walking to Nome and I resign myself to having company all the way to Cripple.

  Past Ophir, on both the northern and southern route, the trail traverses a huge expanse of rolling hills and forested river valleys before reaching the Yukon. The terrain includes vast stretches of taiga such as this. (Taiga is Russian for “land of little sticks.”)

  Shortly after I take the lead in this convoy we reach a well-marked turn off of the main trail. After 100 yards on this detour we break out of a tree line onto the Innoko River bottoms. Dead ahead is the infamous temporary bridge, and it looks even worse than the
checker described it.

  It is actually no more than several spruce logs laid across the open part of the river, anchored on what’s left of the ice attached to either bank. Spruce boughs have been laid on top of the logs and then covered with snow to form a semblance of a walkway. By now, of course, there’s not much snow left and the whole affair more resembles an elongated brush pile than a major engineering work. The approach is across river ice awash in six inches of flowing water, as is the 50 feet from the bridge to the far bank.

  I’ve got Pullman up front and after a moment’s hesitation she charges through the overflow and onto the span. She’s over it and into the equally bad stuff on the other side before the sled is actually on the logs. I have my hands full trying to keep the sled lined up on the bridge, which seems to get narrower as I get closer. The water off either edge is deeper than I care to contemplate; all I want is for Pullman to keep going to the opposite shore and get the sled back onto terra firma.

  Suddenly Pullman decides to look for a better way around the far-side overflow, but when she leaves the trail she breaks through the ice up to her collar. She flounders in the freezing water while I yell for her to go on. The sled is stalled in the middle of the bridge and I have no room to step around it to help her out of the water without taking a plunge myself. Luckily she clambers onto thicker ice in a few seconds and makes a beeline for the far shore, followed by the rest of the team and finally the sled and me.

  I stop everyone on the far side and straighten out a few minor tangles. Pullman has been nearly fully immersed but the sun is warm and the temperature is almost above freezing; I decide the best medicine is to push on and let her dry out in the open air. Besides, she’s shaken herself nearly dry and obviously wants to go on.

  As we pull off toward Cripple, now only a few miles distant, I glance back and see the continental cyclist sitting on the far shore pondering his options. He’s watched the whole frantic episode and I’d give a penny for his thoughts about dog mushing right now.

  Once across the river the great god of overflow calls a truce for several miles, apparently having had enough fun with us for the time being. We’re slowed down to a crawl because of the heat and the bright sun and it’s another two hours before I finally see a banner emblazoned “Cripple” stretched across the trail on the far side of a 100-yard patch of inch-deep water. With a sigh I urge Pullman across the moat into the dubious refuge of the ephemeral Cripple checkpoint.

  We splash under the banner to the applause of the checkers and the vet, all of whom I know. It’s three p.m. and I’m the last musher into the checkpoint. One of the checkers says he won a bet by the mere fact of my making it this far, which reassures me no end.

  Half a dozen teams are still here waiting out the afternoon heat and I join them. There’s no water for our cookers, but the snow is so heavy and crusted because of the recent thaw it easily yields plenty of liquid. The dogs gratefully accept the moist food and curl up in the snow for a rest in the sun. They don’t realize it but they’ve lessened their load for the next stretch by 15 pounds or so.

  I chat with the checkers and the other mushers, who of course are all dues-paying members of the unofficial tail-enders club. Everyone has had similar experiences with the overflow and the ice. No one is looking forward to the next 125 miles to Ruby, which promises to take 24 hours or more. We’ve gotten a not-exactly-reassuring message back from one of the teams to go through earlier: it says simply the trail is hazardous and in bad shape until we get to Sulatna Crossing, 75 miles farther on where the trail picks up another old mining road for the last 50 miles into Ruby.

  The Cripple checkpoint is nothing more than a wide spot on the trail next a suitable skiplane landing area on the frozen Innoko River. Tents, straw, dog food, and other equipment are flown in (and out) by the Iditarod Air Force. Teams are bedded down on lines of straw wherever a place can be found among the straggling black spruce trees.

  The only bright spot is a much-rumored “hospitality tent” at Sulatna Crossing. The official checkpoint at Sulatna was discontinued several years ago because it was difficult to supply by air. The new incarnation is a private operation but has the race’s blessing, and is supposed to have food and a place to rest. Everyone is looking forward to it as a badly needed break in what is rapidly becoming a torture test.

  While I’m trying to rest, the mystery cyclist finally comes in. After more gesturing, we determine he is from Austria, and he has pulled a muscle and needs to rest. The checkpoint crew will be here until tomorrow so they offer him a place to crash for awhile. As near as I can make out, he’s actually trying to get to Nome on his bike. Unless I can get my guys to speed up from their turtle’s pace, he may well beat me there.

  By six o’clock the assault of sunlight has subsided. The general mood is this is not going to be a walk in the park, but it’s something we’ll just have to get through. Ruby is the shining light at the end of the dark tunnel; everyone will be much relieved to be on the Yukon for a couple hundred miles of relatively easy running.

  Knowing I’ll eventually be passed by everyone else, I leave before several of the others. The trail isn’t too bad for the first 20 miles or so as we run down the east side of the Innoko River to the site of the old Cripple Landing, now completely vanished. In its heyday just after the turn of the century it was a steamboat stop serving the mines in the gold belt which stretched south from Ruby all the way to Ophir and McGrath and down to Iditarod.

  This part of the modern race trail wasn’t part of the original Iditarod, which actually ran southwest from Takotna to its namesake town. However, there’s plenty of history on the northern route. The Serum Run of 1925 went down the Yukon along the Yukon Mail Trail, passing through Ruby, Galena, and Nulato enroute to Kaltag and the coast, just as we will do in a day or two. And the Ruby mining district has been producing gold for 90 years; its ghost towns of Poorman and Long are every bit as intriguing as their southern counterparts of Flat and Iditarod.

  However, we’re not seeing a lot of history as we punch along the trail in the fading light. Lisa Moore has caught up with me and we’ve been running more or less together for a couple of hours. The trail passes the site of old Cripple Landing and strikes out cross-country, northeast toward Poorman, about 40 miles distant. Soon we’re both passed by the rest of the teams that waited longer at Cripple before leaving.

  Once again I’m bringing up rear of the race, but I’m confident my team is solid and not about to quit on me. And I feel better knowing I’m still moving with others of similar station. In short, I’m not alone this year; it’s a comforting feeling. I’m still very much a part of this race, even if I’m not about to keep the leaders looking over their shoulder for me.

  The trail climbs steadily away from the river, following the base of a low ridge. Of course, such a sidehill trail is prone to overflow this year and we are quickly back in the messy business. We labor over an endless succession of low rises and drop down into anonymous gullies, each with its own little soggy surprise at the bottom. We pass one particular section I distinctly remember flying over a couple of years ago looking for Ron; unfortunately I have no idea how far it was from anywhere, so the information only serves to confuse me further.

  As the sun sets, the deepening twilight begins to collapse our universe. The moon is rising later each evening and when night falls the darkness is complete, costing us what little orientation we’ve had from looking at the terrain around us. We feel as if we’ve been swallowed by a great featureless void through which we seem to make no progress.

  Later in the evening we come to another detour off the main trail. After a half mile or so we enter a forest paved with semi-frozen overflow. Without warning we’re running along the glare ice of a 40-foot-wide river. I look down and in the beam of my headlight I clearly see bubbles moving in the current beneath the not-so-thick ice. I suddenly have an overwhelming urge to be anywhere else.

  We follow the channel for a few hundred feet and Lisa yel
ls to stop; the erratically marked trail has jumped off the river to the left and she’s just barely caught a glimpse of a reflective marker off in the trees. After I wrestle the team to a stop I notice the spruce boughs originally used to block the channel and divert teams off the ice have been swept aside. Someone must have roared on down the thinly frozen slough to who knows where.

  As I’m scrambling on the ice to lead Socks back onto what looks to be the correct trail, I see another team coming back up the river. Mark Black, another of the back-of-the-pack rookies who passed us a couple of hours ago, pulls to a shaky stop. He says he went right through the flattened barrier and down (or up?) the slough for several miles.

  When he didn’t see any more trail markers he got suspicious, and when the river ice started to crack ominously underneath him he got downright scared. At 250 pounds and six-foot-something, Mark is no lightweight and he had no illusions about trying to float like a feather across thin ice. He is quite relieved to be back here, although none of us is really sure where “here” actually is.

  Lisa gets her team pointed toward the nearest trail marker gleaming dully through the trees and gets underway. She has to stop several times to negotiate tight turns but is eventually out of sight on the other side of the tree line. When the trail appears clear I get Socks aimed in approximately the right direction and gently urge him into the trees.

  While Socks is a superb leader, he has a habit (which I actually encourage) of going directly from marker to marker at night; Pullman is actually better at following faint trails, but she’s not up front at the moment. Socks charges off toward the marker and promptly tangles us around at least two trees. I walk out in front of him to see what’s ahead and discover every team ahead of us has apparently picked its own way through the closely packed birch and spruce trunks. I can’t see how to negotiate this obstacle course with anything less maneuverable than a four-wheel-drive ATV with a working reverse gear.