The village of Koyuk and its gravel airstrip hug the north shore of Norton Bay. The State of Alaska maintains airports at more than 200 bush villages and towns to support the air “highway system” on which much of Alaska depends.
After we take care of the dogs and head up into the village to the checkpoint we’re ready for a nap. I have another fax waiting for me, this time from Bert, who is already in Nome. He says we need to keep moving because a major storm is gaining strength in the western Aleutians.
By his estimation, which is usually pretty good since he flies in the Aleutians and the Bering Sea for a living, we have no more than 48 hours before unpleasant things start to happen between here and Nome. If we’re not through the gauntlet by then, we could be stuck for several days.
I know what happens when one of these late-winter weather systems moves through this region and it can be truly biblical. Aside from lousy weather which can include everything from freezing rain to blinding snow, the pressure gradient can trigger hurricane-force winds all along the coast, such as the ones which trapped Andy in front of Nome last year and have nearly killed mushers in previous years. If we get caught, it will be a fight every inch of the way to Front Street, far worse than anything we’ve already endured.
We catch a nap while a local teacher who’s helping the checkers dries some of our gear in the school dryer. I don’t get much sleep worrying about the weather: it’s good now, but in this part of the country, at this time of the year, the only time it’s good is just before it gets bad.
A team pulls into the Koyuk checkpoint. The dogs will be lined out on straw, examined by vets, fed warm food, and allowed to rest for several hours. The driver may also have enough time for a nap and a bite to eat.
March 17—The Iditarod: Koyuk to Elim (48 miles); Elim to White Mountain (46 miles)
We move out on schedule after midnight. This is where Lisa scratched two years ago when her leaders wouldn’t go any more; she insists on going first. As her team moves smoothly out of the checkpoint I can see her relief and I know exactly how she feels. She has finally exorcised her demon. Now she can look forward to the run up Front Street without the ghost of races past hovering over her.
The trail is mainly hard and fast and the dogs are in nighttime high gear. We cruise southwest along the shore ice for 15 miles and then dive inland across a low divide behind Bald Head, a prominent mountain at the tip of a peninsula we could see all the way up from Shaktoolik. By dawn we’re past Bald Head and crossing a series of inlets to Moses Point.
This area has been known to blow hard and was doing so a few days ago, but it’s only whispering now. As the persimmon sun rises above the mountains on the east side of Norton Bay we reach the long spit separating Kwiniuk Inlet from the ocean. Strung out along the narrow strip of sand is the old village of Elim, an eerie collection of ramshackle houses, huts, and fish drying racks. The new town was built a couple of decades ago 20 miles down the coast on high ground and this ancient place is now used as a summer fish camp.
We’re running on the lagoon side of the spit; this lets the slowly rising sun outline each house in turn as we pass. The warm pinks and golds of the sunrise contrast dramatically with the weathered tints of the buildings and the monochromatic whites and grays of the shadowed snow and sea ice. It’s a continuous series of scenes any photographer would kill for and is another well-earned reward for us; I wish the dogs could appreciate is as much as I do.
The trail between Koyuk and Elim runs along the shore ice in places. Winds can jam ice floes onto the shore in jumbled heaps, or just as easily push them back out to sea, leaving open water.
Once more I bemoan the demise of my pocket camera, which expired a few days into the race. I have only a handful of pictures to document what we’ve been through and I’m sure I’m going to regret it later. On the other hand, I’ve found photographs to be woefully inadequate to capture especially important events; often they are better left untaken. The memory is sometimes a better camera. One thing is for certain: there’s no way I’ll ever forget the incredible flood of images recorded in my mind over the past two weeks.
Past the old village we make a slow five-mile run on a very soft and punchy trail across the lagoon to the abandoned Moses Point FAA station. This is a relic of the pre-World-War-II buildup of Alaska’s aviation network. At one time its 5,000-foot runway, hangars, and terminal building hosted dozens of planes a day enroute to and from Nome. Its cluster of trim government houses was home to a dozen families manning this outpost of modern civilization.
The 9-mile state highway from Moses Point to Elim is left unplowed in the winter. The town of Elim and its new airport are at the foot of the hill. The coast around Elim supports a thick forest, one of the very few wooded areas on the Seward Peninsula.
The airport and its buildings are derelict now; the only sign of activity is a radio beacon in its hermetically sealed blockhouse with its generator softly putt-putting above the rustle of the wind. As a pilot, I find scenes like this depressing; too many airports are closing around the country, even in Alaska where airplanes are vital necessities. But I understand what happened here: when the village moved and a new airport was built adjacent to it there was no longer any justification to keep this one open. In some cases progress has a certain rationality to it.
The remaining nine miles into new Elim are on a state-maintained (but unplowed) road which climbs several hundred feet to skirt the bluffs punctuating the coastline from here to Nome. We roll into the checkpoint late in the morning and discover my old friend Jasper Bond is running things, having transferred here after he finished more than three weeks in the wilderness at Rohn.
As usual he’s got everything well organized, right down to finding a convenient source of hot water. Within half an hour the dogs are fed and resting in the warm sun; this is the first true out-of-the-wind rest they’ve had since the Yukon. We’ll wait out the heat of the afternoon and then push on in time to get over the mountains to Golovin by dark. In the meantime Jasper’s crew has sandwiches and hot soup ready for us inside the spacious state maintenance garage being used as the checkpoint.
Checker Jasper Bond looks over teams at Elim while mushers take a break inside the nearby checkpoint. (Jasper usually works the Rohn checkpoint earlier in the race.)
After a good nap we get ready to leave about mid-afternoon. Jasper and his people are closing up the checkpoint; the plane is already on the way to take them to Nome for this afternoon’s banquet. I jokingly ask Jasper (who resembles a pro football lineman and is known to have a healthy appetite) to save some food for our arrival tomorrow.
We all leave Elim about the same time; the trail runs alongside the airport and we watch the Iditarod Air Force plane take off as we head out of town. Two years ago I was flying the plane that pulled the last volunteers out of Elim for the banquet; I’m certainly getting a different perspective on things today.
Once we’re past the airport, the race route out of Elim this year doesn’t follow the sea ice for the first 10 miles as it usually does. The strange weather this winter has resulted in open water just offshore from here to Nome. Instead, we’re using the old mail trail, an overland detour we heard about a few days ago but which didn’t sound like anything to cause undue worry. It’s a little longer but the villagers have told us it’s quite a beautiful run, so we’re in the cruise mode.
Like everyone else, we consider the main challenge on this leg to be crossing the mountains between the coast and Golovnin Bay. From an abandoned coastal cabin at Walla Walla 10 miles south of Elim, the trail turns inland, to the west. Then it climbs directly up and over a series of 1,000-foot ridges which culminate in Little McKinley, a 1,200-foot summit overlooking the village of Golovin.
Many mushers consider Little McKinley the toughest climb on the race. It’s even worse than Rainy Pass because its succession of brutal climbs probably totals 5,000 feet or more, all within only eight miles, interspersed with steep downhills which don’t give the
dogs a chance to recover. Additionally, the weather is often abominable because the entire overland stretch is completely above timberline and exposed to the almost incessant wind.
Little McKinley will be hard work for the dogs, but they’re well rested. In fact, my team is getting stronger and stronger as we work toward Nome. After 1,500 miles of training and 1,000 miles on the Iditarod, the dogs are superbly conditioned and trail-tough and could probably run the remaining 100 miles to Front Street nonstop if I asked them. They’re working as a single coordinated unit and showing the intuitive trail savvy of seasoned Iditarod veterans. I modestly consider the 11 I’ve been running since Kaltag to be the best dog team I’ve ever driven, even if they’re not very fast.
After the first mile out of Elim we decide we shouldn’t have been leaning forward so much to Little McKinley because we’ve got trouble right here in River City. The allegedly innocuous mail trail is turning out to be not your average dog trail: it’s a narrow, roller-coaster, mogul-marred cliff-hanger through heavy forest requiring every ounce of skill and attention we can muster, and then some.
It repeatedly climbs abruptly hundreds of feet to snake along the tops of dizzying bluffs and then plunges down steep tree-choked chutes which threaten to wear out our brakes. Several times I get ambushed by cleverly concealed low-hanging branches that nearly wipe me off the sled. We spend an inordinate amount of time angling along hillsides so steep I don’t even want to look down them.
At one point we run for 50 yards along a ledge not more than three feet wide with a rock wall on the uphill side and a 300-foot drop to the beach on the other. It’s so tight I’m worried if one of the dogs sneezes we’ll become the blue-plate special at Chez Raven down on the rocks below.
This trail is genuinely terrifying. I’m glad I didn’t know about it beforehand or I might have had second thoughts. Dalzell Gorge and the Blueberry Hills were only warm-ups for this monster. I’m profoundly thankful I didn’t waltz blithely into this at night.
After a thrill-packed hour and a half I finally ease the team off the flanks of Mount Kwiniuk and onto the beach at Walla Walla with all of our various appendages and appurtenances still in their appropriate places. The country has been beautiful and the scenery spectacular, but I don’t think the Elim mail trail will ever make it into the Guide Michelin.
I’ve been so busy maintaining my death grip on the handlebar I haven’t noticed I’ve outrun Lisa and Andy. I stop the team to wait for them and feed some frozen beef while I try to coax my adrenaline level back into its normal operating range. Fifteen minutes later Lisa pulls up; she’s still shaking from her E-ticket ride over the mail trail and also calls a temporary halt to the festivities.
We wait for Andy for quite awhile, growing more and more worried something has happened to him. Finally we hear a snowmachine coming from the direction of Elim. We flag down the rider and ask him if he’s seen a team on the trail behind us. To our immense relief he says a musher returned to Elim just before he left and is back at the now-closed checkpoint. Lisa and I don’t know if Andy has given up or is just resting his dogs as he’s done earlier on the race. In any event, he’s on his own now; besides, we’re not sure we’d survive the trip back to Elim to check on him.
We thank the snowmachiner, who’s on his way to White Mountain on an everyday 50-mile afternoon trip in the Bush, and shortly follow our fellow traveler up the first of the interminable grades leading to Little McKinley. After two miles of steady uphill slogging I’m glad I’ve got a lot of big males on the team. Nobody’s really even breathing hard and I only need to assist with a perfunctory pump once in awhile. Lisa, however, is having more difficulty with her smaller team and is doing a lot of walking, so I periodically stop and wait for her to catch up.
As we gain the top of the first hill we’re well above timberline; stretching to the west I can see the series of ridges we’re about to cross. Surprisingly, there’s not a breath of wind up here and the temperature is almost above freezing. The clement weather is unusual but certainly not unwelcome; this upland stretch is known for its extremes and we’re thankful for a lucky break after our tribulations around Unalakleet and Shaktoolik.
After another hour and a half of by-now-routine ups and downs we power up the final incline to Little McKinley itself and stop just before the steep three-mile downgrade to take in the view. Ice-covered Golovnin Bay lies below us, probing 20 miles northwest past the village of Golovin on its rocky point to our goal of White Mountain, nestled far inland under its wooded namesake hill alongside the Fish River.
Unlike the heavily forested eastern side of the mountains, the slopes below us and to the west as far as we can see are bleak and barren except for scrub. The only real trees from here to somewhere in Siberia are much further inland, limited strictly to sheltered slopes and river valleys.
The author with Pullman (left) and Socks (right) atop Little McKinley in the 1996 race. Nome is less than a hundred miles ahead over a fast trail. (Photo by Lisa Moore)
The sun is just about to set over Topkok Head 35 miles to the west and the rich late-afternoon light gilds everything around us. On the western horizon beyond Topkok we can barely see the hazy outline of Cape Nome, now only 60 air miles away with Front Street and the burled arch only a few miles further on.
We hold a quick meeting of the tail-enders’ club and officially decide we can start to have fun now. For the first time since leaving Anchorage I really relax. We’re actually going to make it even if we have to hole up somewhere to wait out the approaching storm, of which we’ve so far seen no sign.
As the sun sets over the Russian Far East—only a couple of hundred miles away—we plunge down the hill toward Golovin. Shortly we pass the shelter cabin at the mouth of McKinley Creek and turn up the ice of the bay toward the village. The sky is crystal clear and the wind is dead calm; the temperature begins to plummet toward zero as the sun disappears. The trail is hard and fast and the lights of the village beckon invitingly.
Golovin is a small Inupiat Eskimo settlement of slightly more than 100 souls. The village was already old when Captain Golovnin of the Imperial Russian Navy sailed through this area in the early 1800s. The bay as well as the lagoon behind the town still retain the correct spelling of his name; the name of the village has been subtly changed over the years. Golovin was a full-fledged stop on the early Iditarods but now it is only a sign-in checkpoint and few mushers, at least in the front end of the race, spend much time here.
Lisa and I decide to stop in town to get into some warmer gear. I ask the checker about a place to change clothes and she says to wait a minute. Shortly she helps us park our dogs and then ushers us into her aunt’s house, where we are plied unmercifully with coffee, tea, hot chocolate, sandwiches, soup, cookies, offers of places to rest, and good conversation.
Here in Agnes Amarok’s snug home we find the warmest display of hospitality either of us has yet seen on the race. We are completely taken with the wonderful people of Golovin, several of whom stop through to say hello and offer encouragement and trail information.
We spend a couple of hours relaxing in this unexpected but completely welcome haven. As we chat it develops Lisa went to high school in Nome with the checker, and a couple of the older residents remember Ron from his early Iditarods; once again the big-state-small-world paradox manifests itself.
The awards banquet in Nome is still going on and we listen to it on the radio while munching sandwiches and sipping hot coffee. We figure this is a fair exchange for not making the party ourselves; we’ll take some extra time here and attend the banquet vicariously via KNOM radio.
Eventually we realize we must leave to get on to White Mountain, an easy 18-mile run across Golovnin Lagoon. Our hosts duly warn us about a potential problem which snared Martin Buser and DeeDee Jonrowe. It seems an inviting side trail leading to a hunting camp was marked similarly to the Iditarod before the race. Martin and DeeDee got confused and took it, costing them an extra hour and a half, and slippin
g DeeDee a place in the final standings.
We get specific instructions to avoid this: take the trail heading directly for the White Mountain airport beacon, easily visible for the entire run from Golovin. We figure this is about as simple as it gets and move out, promising to spend some time in Golovin on future Iditarods.
I take the lead out of town, carefully avoiding the false turnoff. Once out on the ice, the trail across the lagoon is ideal in every respect: straight as an arrow, well-marked, perfectly groomed, and utterly level. The temperature is perhaps 10 below zero and the dogs accelerate immediately to nighttime cruising speed.
In my headlight I can see an endless line of golden reflectors pointing northwest, precisely at the rhythmic green-and-white strobe of the White Mountain beacon on the horizon. Mariners throughout history have navigated by lighthouses just as we are using the beacon flash. This is also how pilots found their way at night up until the 1930s, following airway beacons just like this one across the darkened landscape before instrument flying was developed.
The sense of voyaging is inescapable. Socks and Pullman are up front and are following the well-defined trail as if they are on rails. The rest of the team is pulling so quietly and smoothly I almost don’t realize they’re there. We are on full autopilot, leaving me with nothing to do but ride along and keep myself amused.
My headlight is just a nuisance on this trail so I turn it off. When I do I gasp in awe. Here in the middle of the flat, five-mile-wide expanse of the lagoon, the clear moonless sky arches overhead in an incandescent blaze of stars. The evening star hovers in the west—over Nome—with a brilliance unmatched even by the powerfully focused beacon ahead.
Alaska Dogs and Iditarod Mushers Page 45