My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian: Mushing Across Alaska in the Iditarod--The World's Most Grueling Race

by Brian Patrick O'donoghue

  I was also watching Cyrus with considerable concern, but that wasn’t a new development. He hadn’t looked good since his foot problems surfaced at Rohn. Rattles’s pup was a changed dog, and not for the better. He was listless. His ears were down, and his tug line, running in wheel, was often slack. He wasn’t even ripping off his booties anymore — the one good sign since I had devoted a lot of time to keeping his paws medicated.

  The Coach would have dropped Cyrus in an instant. “Remember, O’D, you’re only as fast as your slowest dog.” I was not sure why, but I wasn’t ready to give up on Cyrus yet.

  The 38-mile trail to Ophir followed a closed seasonal road through a valley flanked by savage mountains. “Weight Limit” signs were posted at several small bridges, specifying tonnage restrictions for various vehicles. I snapped a picture of my dog team trotting by one of the signs.

  The morning was cool and clear. The team made good time behind Chad and Raven, our fair-weather duo. Despite an increasing number of cabins alongside the road, the valley was marked by a disturbing stillness. No welcoming smoke rose from the cabins here. They were entombed, cold and lifeless. The eerie spell was broken by a hand-painted sign taped to a trail marker: “Ophir, 5 miles,” framing a sketch of a smiling coffee cup.

  The Ophir checkpoint pulsated with life. Inviting smoke rose from a cabin nestled in a grove of tall spruce. A neat line of supply sacks rested outside the cabin, near an assortment of snowmachines, freight sleds, and a small mountain of trash and surplus gear. The checkpoint was staffed by veterinarian Mary Hoffheimer, a radio operator, and the owners of the cabin.

  “I was beginning to wonder if you would ever get here,” said Mary, whom I knew from covering past races. She frowned with mock indignation.

  The veterinarian carefully examined Cricket, feeling for sore spots and manipulating her legs. Like me, Mary couldn’t find any cause for the limp. The dog’s leg might have been asleep, she said, or possessed some other kink that worked itself out. There was another possibility, Mary suggested, smiling. My little Cricket might have faked the whole thing — in hopes of hitching a free ride.

  “Could you also check that bandage on Skidders?” I asked, and went on to tell her about my harrowing plunge off the cliff in the Burn.

  “Wait a minute,” she said, peeling the bandage from the staples. “I’ve heard about this dog. You’re the one!”

  Hoffheimer said she’d run into the vet who treated Skidders in Nikolai. He’d described a semihysterical rookie who had dragged him out of bed to treat an old dog who was mending just fine. “I put in a few staples,” the vet told Mary, “more to calm the musher than anything else.”

  “That rat bastard!” I said.

  We compared notes on the race as Mary changed Skidders’s bandage. Working this, her third Iditarod, the New Hampshire veterinarian had the opportunity to watch the entire field pass through checkpoints. The general condition of dogs appeared excellent, she said, in teams traveling in both the front and the back ends of the race field. But the vet was appalled by what she had seen in several of the middle teams.

  Inside the cabin, Mary raided the checkpoint supplies and heated me a bowl of stew. I studied the checker’s log while I ate. Four teams had departed Ophir within three hours of my arrival: Linda Plettner, Urtha Lenthar, Mark Williams, and Gunnar Johnson. But those mushers had all rested here for at least 13 hours, and most had stayed closer to 19 hours. Worse, the Poodle Man was reported already out of Iditarod, meaning that he had a lead of at least a hundred miles. But Suter’s speed was deceptive. The fool hadn’t yet taken his 24-hour layover, a strategy that had the vets increasingly concerned. The damn poodles hadn’t beat us yet.

  I could have used a nap, but I didn’t plan to linger long in Ophir. I was in a hurry, determined to press on before Lee and the others caught up. Such foolishness shaped my thinking as I rushed into a series of stupid mistakes.

  King was sleeping off his big dinner. Butcher mushed into Anvik, paused just 12 minutes, then led a wave of veteran teams up the Yukon River.

  By the time King resumed the chase, three hours later, Butcher was resting at the next checkpoint, Grayling, with eight other mushers on the way. The front pack held no surprises to those familiar with the race: Barve, Jonrowe, Garnie, Buser, Tim Osmar, Runyan, Swenson, and Matt “the Miner” Desalernos from Nome.

  Butcher paused six hours in the village of Grayling, resting her dogs through the heat of the day. The champ then set the pace again, leaving on the 60-mile trail to Eagle Island at 3:20 P.M. on Saturday.

  Adkins mushed into Grayling as Butcher pulled out. The Montanan paused just five minutes and then gave chase. By dusk, ten teams were streaking up the Yukon behind Butcher, with half a dozen others preparing to follow.

  The forecast called for a blizzard with possible temperatures of 30 below on the windy river. “I’m just going to wear everything I’ve got,” former champion Rick Mackey told reporters.

  The predicted storm didn’t materialize, but strong winds and drifting powdery snow slowed Butcher to a crawl.

  At 11:30 A.M. on Sunday — at approximately the same time I mushed into Ophir, 200 miles south — Joe Runyan parked his dogs in the ravine below Ralph and Helmi Conatser’s cabin on Eagle Island. Coming from behind, Runyan had beaten Butcher, Barve, and Quest veteran Kate Persons to the remote island checkpoint by nearly half an hour.

  Nome remained more than 400 miles away. No one wanted to break trail to Kaltag, a tough 70 miles farther up the Yukon. Front-runners bedded their dogs in the snow, built crackling wood fires, and nervously eyed each other, daring someone, anyone, to make the first move.

  Ralph Conatser had checked in 23 teams before the first musher left. The deadlock was broken at 6:30 P.M. on Sunday by Jeff King. Within an hour, the chase was resumed by Barve, Runyan, Buser, Swenson, Jonrowe, and Butcher — whose 18-dog team remained the largest and best rested among Iditarod’s lead pack.

  Logic was left out of the equation as I repacked for the 90-mile haul to Iditarod. I was obsessed with cutting weight in the sled. Speed. Speed was all-important. With that goal in mind, it was time to improvise. For the upcoming run, one of the longest in the race, I sought to maximize speed by carrying less dog food than I had originally planned.

  Checkpoint volunteers were sorting the surplus left by other teams, salvaging what they could, burning most of the rest. As I dragged over a sack filled with spare bags of lamb, liver, and beef, an uproar broke out over another musher’s castoffs.

  “Eels?” cried one of the volunteers, dropping the bag and jumping backwards. The exotic fare was left by Chase. The light-traveling Athabaskan had passed through Ophir the previous morning.

  The sun remained high. My dogs had only been resting about three and a half hours. They were groggy as I put on their booties. Most recurled and fell back asleep as I moved down the line.

  Then I heard the word I’d been dreading: “Team!”

  It was Daily.

  I began chucking my gear in the sled, preparing for a fast getaway.

  Mary stood on the brake as I guided Harley and Chad over to the trail. The dogs were balking; none were happy about leaving so soon. I lifted Screech, Scar, even Rainy, off the ground by their harnesses and stood them upright.

  “You’re leaving?” said Daily, parking his team nearby.

  “That’s right,” I said in a false, bright tone. “These dogs smell poodle meat.”

  Mary didn’t say anything, but the vet side of her must have been appalled watching my team wobble out of Ophir. The dogs moved stiffly. I’d never seen them looking so discouraged. Even Raven hung her head, uncharacteristically quiet. Life in a chain gang obviously wasn’t something she cared to bark about.

  Roughly halfway to Iditarod was an old uninhabited shelter known as Don’s Cabin. My plan was to push straight through to it. The distance was about 45 miles. We had clear weather, and I figured the team could do that in six or seven hours, easily.

  Cutting s
hort the team’s rest backfired on me. Any benefits of leaving early were sapped by traveling for hours in the blazing sun. The team’s speed faded in the heat. Thirsty Harley led the crew in gulping snow at every opportunity.

  By midnight, there was no sign of Don’s Cabin, and I was losing the battle to stay awake. We had covered plenty of ground. That was evident from the changed landscape. The trail was rising over a barren dome of tundra, rock, and ice. This was a harsh and menacing place, a desolate end-of-the-earth setting. And if I thought it was bad — outfitted in my space-age gear, driving dogs fueled by the best nutrition money could buy, tapping caches of supplies flown in for my convenience — what must it have been like in 1910? Those cheechakos, stampeding toward the new strikes reported at Iditarod, had protected their hands with rags and had stuffed newspapers under their coats for insulation.

  Redington’s Great Race was often billed as a tribute to a 1925 serum run. I’ve always considered that story a farce. Dog teams were used to rush diphtheria vaccine to Nome, but the serum was transported in a 675-mile relay from Nenana, hundreds of miles off the Iditarod Trail. One musher, Leonard Seppala, had mushed more than a hundred miles to collect the precious package, then carried it 91 miles. But the other eighteen serum-team drivers weren’t involved in anything comparable to the modern event. I had more admiration for the forgotten miners and mail carriers who had chanced this desolate passage without glory or a crisis to drive them.

  Few markers remained standing in the thin, wind-blasted snow covering the barren hills. I followed what I took to be the paw marks of previous dog teams. The tracks were strangely grouped, covering a broad swath across the biggest dome. Only later did I discover that I was mistakenly trailing a caribou herd other mushers had seen in the area. I kept dozing, repeatedly catching myself in the process of falling off the sled. Part of me whispered “stop,” but the forbidding countryside spurred me onward. It would be hard to find a worse place to get caught in a storm.

  At last the trail began descending. Steering the team toward a line of scrubby bushes, I made camp. Moving like a zombie, I threw all the food I could find together and cooked the dogs a hot meal. Then I crawled on top of the sled, not bothering with the sleeping bag, and slept.

  Dawn was reaching over the moonscape when I awoke. It was cold. Shivering inside my clammy suit, I hustled to get the dogs ready. In ten minutes, max, the team was on the move. Guiding the sled with one hand, I ran alongside, pumping my legs to generate heat.

  Perhaps two miles beyond where we had camped stood what had to be Don’s Cabin. Dogs started barking as we approached. Someone was home. It was Ralf Kuba, a German adventurer making his second attempt to travel the Iditarod Trail on skis. A year earlier, he had set out on the same mission, using two German Shepherds, Cessy and Sagus, to pull his pulka, a small light sled. He had made it as far as Takotna before the remote checkpoints ahead closed.

  This year Kuba had beefed up his small team with Trapper, a veteran Iditarod husky, and he had set out three days before the start of the race. I found him in a depressed mood.

  “It’s no good,” he said. “The dogs are sick and weak.”

  The German’s dogs looked pretty lively to me. And fat.

  Checking out Don’s Cabin, I decided that anyone would be come depressed in that rat hole. The place was falling apart, with broken windows and a thick layer of ice spilling inside. This was the proverbial last resort; that it was described as a shelter confirmed my worst suspicions about the weather in this area.

  I pinned a note to the front door urging Barry Lee to hurry up. The trail was starting to get lonely. Kuba was miserable, but he assured me that he wasn’t in trouble. I left him there, promising to advise the checker in Iditarod about his difficulties.

  Another clear bright day. By midmorning I was sweating and began stripping down, shedding first the snowmachine suit, then the thick bibs. The heat was tough on the dogs, but I kept pushing. My foolishness had thrust us into a different sort of race: the dog food was gone. What mattered now was reaching Iditarod before my dogs crashed, or another storm rolled in. Getting pinned down out here would mean the end of my race.

  I wasted precious time putting up with Chad’s antics, figuring he set the fastest pace. A lead dog’s speed is moot when he squats in protest every hundred yards. I finally came to my senses and put Harley and Rainy in lead, two dogs I could count on to keep us moving forward. To pick up the dogs’ spirits, I cut up my two remaining personal steaks — the last food left in the sled — into 15 small bites and passed those out. I’m not sure it was helpful, particularly for Harley, whose hunger was fanned by this miniature appetizer.

  With his insatiable appetite, Harley had never been good about passing anything edible on the trail. With the sun beating down and an empty belly gnawing at his concentration, the big dog was far too hungry to pay attention to a musher holding an empty snack bag. Following his nose, Harley began dragging the team off the trail into each and every campsite left by the 62 teams that had passed this way before me. He was determined to scarf every shred of food those other teams had left behind, and I couldn’t really blame him.

  We slowed to a crawl behind Harley’s meandering quest. Hungry Boy was as oblivious to my shouts as he was to the lesbian’s attempts to mount him from behind. Screech, meanwhile, had picked up an old glove and was sucking on it like a Lifesaver.

  “Hey, there’s a letter for you,” Kuba told Daily as the musher stopped outside Don’s Cabin.

  Daily wondered if he was hallucinating. Who was this German with two fat shepherds? The musher relaxed when he read my note and realized it was addressed to Barry Lee. Daily was encouraged to hear that I wasn’t more than a few hours ahead. Not because he wanted to beat me. Tom wasn’t seriously racing this year. He didn’t need to, not with his two-year sponsorship deal. No, Tom Daily was getting lonely.

  Lavon Barve lead a group of seven teams off the Yukon River into Kaltag early Monday morning — day ten of the Iditarod — but these front-runners weren’t hanging together for the company. Barve, Butcher, Runyan, Buser, Osmar, Swenson, and King were forcing the pace, pushing each other toward Nome, 350 miles ahead.

  “This is rumble time,” Buser told a Times reporter. “When somebody pulls the ice hook, you’ve got to go.”

  For the second year in a row, Barve made the first move in Kaltag. The hefty Wasilla printer mushed out of the village at 8 A.M., bound for the coastal town of Unalakleet. Butcher, Buser, and King gave chase within the hour, with Runyan and Swenson not far behind.

  “Right now, it’s Susan, Lavon, Rick, and Runyan,” said Butcher’s husband, Dave Monson. “We should know by the end of today.”

  Most observers gave the edge to Butcher. The defending champ’s 16-dog team remained the largest in the front pack. She was a superb athlete herself, famous for running behind her sled, providing an extra boost climbing hills. Butcher’s compact frame and slight build also gave her team a substantial weight advantage over those of the larger contenders, Barve, Swenson, Buser, and Runyan.

  The weight differential had long obsessed Barve, who carried as much as 240 pounds on his own burly frame. He wanted a rule linking the number of dogs in each team to the weight of the team’s driver. According to Barve, “jockeys,” such as Butcher and the bantam-sized King, ought to be restricted to smaller teams of, say, 13 dogs instead of 20—to keep the race fair. He left Kaltag with 14 dogs, grousing to reporters about the difficulty of competing against Butcher’s larger team.

  As he prepared to follow, Swenson had more on his mind than dogs. His wife Kathy had called to resume an argument that had led the musher to order her away from an earlier checkpoint. Race judge Chisholm was present when Swenson took the phone call. “Afterward,” he said, “Rick was possessed.”

  Late Monday afternoon, I spied Daily’s team in the distance. Watching him close the gap, it was as if my sled was being pulled by a string of Arctic turtles. I felt crushed and defeated as he passed me with
a friendly wave.

  Daily halted about a hundred yards ahead and planted his snow hook. He turned to me holding a carved pipe. “Do you smoke?” he asked.

  Alaska was no longer a pot smoker’s haven. As a result of the recriminalization measure adopted during the November general election, possession of small amounts of marijuana was now punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to 90 days in jail. But cops weren’t patrolling the Iditarod Trail as Daily and I shared a few puffs on the crest of a barren hill.

  Looking out over the desolate valley before us, I wondered again at the madness that drove the gold seekers to bet their lives on the harsh country ahead.

  “Let’s go home,” I said as we neared a cluster of deteriorating buildings. Rat and the other dogs broke into a full lope — the very effect intended when the Coach and I had begun using those words in the final mile of training runs. Over the course of the race, the phrase was becoming ever more powerful. “Let’s go home” tipped the dogs that a checkpoint, rest, and food lay within the team’s grasp.

  The McGrath vet blamed Rock’s hair loss on stress. The dog’s condition certainly wasn’t serious, he said.

  Barry Lee wasn’t so sure. Rock was shivering under her thinning coat, putting the dog at risk if the weather turned bad. Figuring he had nothing to lose, Barry paid a visit to the store and bought Rock a child-sized sweatshirt.

  Rock sported her souvenir sweatshirt as far as Ophir, but it wasn’t doing the trick. It was getting colder. Watching her shiver on her bed of straw, Lee knew the dog had given him everything she could. Rock was headed home.

  Crossing the barrens near Don’s Cabin Monday night, Lee found most of the trail markers had been blown down by the wind. Where he could, Lee jammed the markers in the ground, standing them upright for Garth and Peele, who were still bringing up the rear.