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

by Brian Patrick O'donoghue

  Sleep deprivation overtook Lee as he descended the hills. He kept dozing, and hallucinated that he was running over his wheel dogs. Before that became a reality, the musher made camp in an exposed spot with nothing to break the wind. Lee was cold, very cold, in his cheap sleeping bag.

  He was awakened by a dog team.

  “I’m shattered, simply shattered,” Garth whispered to Lee before continuing toward Iditarod.

  Shivering in his sleeping bag, Lee pondered the Englishman’s strange remark.

  Daily mushed up the river into the ghost town at 6:30 P.M. on Monday, March 11. I trailed in ten minutes later. Passing Iditarod’s skeletal buildings, I studied the broken windows for ghosts. I didn’t see any, but the ruins had a presence to them.

  Most of the race staff had already flown north, leaving Rich Runyan, a ham radio operator, to serve as the checker for us stragglers in the rear of the field. A veterinarian was also left at the checkpoint. He was packed and itching to get out as soon as Iditarod’s air force could rescue him.

  Doc Cooley, the mushing vet, had his leased dogs bedded down nearby on the frozen beach. They were a feisty bunch of champion-caliber sled dogs, the same ones Minnesota musher John Patten had recently mushed to victory in Montana’s 500-mile Race to the Sky. Cooley wasn’t traveling fast enough to tire the dogs out, and they continually snarled and scrapped amongst themselves. Despite the hair-curling growls, blood was seldom, if ever, spilled. The fighting was largely for show. The snarls amounted to trash talk among a team of highly competitive athletes. Daily and I nicknamed his dogs “Doc’s wolf pack.”

  My dogs came alive as I dug through my checkpoint supply sacks for whitefish. I had to anchor Harley’s neck line with my second snow hook to prevent a mob assault on the rations. I threw the team frozen slices of liver and chunks of lamb.

  A hole was chopped in the river ice for water. But the water was stained dark yellow from the area’s high mineral content. Yuck. So, using melted snow for dog water, I pumped hot stew into the dogs until even Harley shied away from his bowl. As they slept off the feast, I cooked a second meal to dish out in the morning. My team wasn’t budging for at least 12 hours, and not until I heard the dogs barking again. I wanted to erase all memory of that last hard march.

  After ten days on the trail, my feet were rotting inside those clammy bunny boots. If I didn’t dry them out, I might as well just grab the axe and start amputating.

  Daily shunned cabins. He much preferred to sleep under the stars. Leaving us to share the warm cabin floor, Tom stretched out near the dog teams, looking forward to a peaceful night.

  The first disturbance was Garth. Lurching to a stop at 3:30 A.M., the Englishman staggered off his sled and headed inside the cabin, leaving his dogs to fend for themselves in an exhausted pile.

  I was sewing harnesses when the Englishman threw open the cabin door and plopped down in a chair by the stove.

  “I’m shattered, simply shattered,” Garth announced. The crazy Englishman had made the 90-mile trip from Ophir in a scorching nine hours.

  Flipping on his headlamp at the second disturbance, Daily confronted a dazzling apparition. It was Kuba, nicknamed “the German from Mars,” owing to the array of reflective tape on the adventurer’s gear.

  The bleary-eyed musher’s patience eroded as Kuba turned his own dogs loose. The three newcomers pranced through the camp, sniffing everything and sending our four teams into a frenzy. Several members of Doc Cooley’s wolf pack got loose, and a new round of fighting erupted.

  Enough was enough. Daily stomped into the cabin and roused Cooley. “Doc,” he demanded, “you’ve got to come and stop the killing.”

  Cooley yawned, staggered outside, and grabbed his loose dogs. He tied the team off to a flimsy stake and trudged back to the cabin. Daily heard the wolf pack renew its bickering, but he was too tired to care anymore.

  My dogs had chewed a total of three harnesses in seven months of training. I figured I was being cautious packing five spares and shipping three more harnesses to various checkpoints. By Skwentna, Daphne alone had shredded three harnesses. The chewing epidemic was just beginning. Other dogs, particularly Rainy, suddenly acquired a taste for harness webbing. By Iditarod, the spares were all in use, and at least half the team was sporting harnesses with patches made from other harnesses beyond repair.

  Doc and Daily left Iditarod Tuesday morning. My own departure was derailed by a sudden outbreak of chewing. So it was that I was polishing my seamstress skills in the cabin, 40 minutes later, when a dog team came trotting up from the river.

  “Barry, I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Lee was mortally tired. You could tell by his puffy red eyes. But his smile was as wide as ever. We talked for a little while, and then I had to go. My team had had 15 hours of rest, and the dogs were getting antsy.

  The 65-mile trail to Shageluk was demonic enough to satisfy my wildest masochistic desires. From the crest of each hill, I’d see another, sometimes several more hills, unblemished save for tiny white scratches rising to the sky through trees and brush. Each faint white streak represented the trail climbing yet another distant hill. There was no end to them. Some of the upward slopes were so steep that I could have done chin-ups on the handlebar. On the descents, the dogs spilled down the powdery gutter in a cloud of paws and fur.

  Doc and Daily were barely two hours ahead, but the wind had largely erased their tracks on the hilltops. And most of the markers were down. I didn’t have too much trouble following the surviving clues in the daylight, but I worried that Lee would be traveling blind after dark. So I made a point of grabbing fallen markers as I passed them, and replanting the reflective sticks in the snow, much as Lee was doing for Garth and Peele. With Iditarod’s front-runners nearing the coast, the doorway to Nome was closing on those of us in the back of Iditarod’s field. We each had to do what we could to keep it open.

  The lesbian was acting strangely. She kept stopping and freezing, with her head cocked as if she was listening. At first it alarmed me — I kept waiting for a moose or a bear to rise out of the brush. But nothing happened. Her pauses had a trancelike quality, as if she was lost in thought. Yelling had no effect.

  “Earth to Rainy. Earth to Rainy,” I said, wondering if she was having a mental breakdown. The thought was scary. The lesbian was our main navigator. Without her, Harley would be impossible to control. Chad, Raven, and the Rat were good for fill-in duty, but that was about it. I needed Rainy. So I waited, and watched, and wondered what the bossy little dog was seeing in her mind’s eye.

  I caught up with Daily about nine that night, near another deserted fish camp. It was a woodsy stretch and, for a while, we lost the trail in deep snow. But within thirty minutes, the markers led us out of the trees and into a village street. A crowd of children escorted us to a building decorated with an official Iditarod checkpoint banner. The building was closed and dark. Daily and I were trying to decide what to do when checker Arnold Hamilton roared up on a snowmachine. He steered us to a field behind the school, where Cooley’s team was already resting.

  “You’re the reporter,” Hamilton said as he returned on the snowmachine. The checker’s son was now aboard. The boy handed me a bucket of hot water. “I read your stories. You’re my pick to get the Red Lantern.”

  “What!” I cried. “How can you say that? I’m miles ahead of Lee and Garth.”

  Hamilton laughed.

  “I’ll find some way to disqualify them,” he said.

  Villagers in Unalakleet, 265 miles ahead, lined the ten-foot-high snow banks of the street cheering the first teams to reach the coast.

  Susan Butcher had reclaimed the lead on the 90-mile trail from Eagle River to Kaltag. Her dogs were fed and resting before Barve trailed her into the village 45 minutes later. Another 25 minutes passed before he was followed by Buser, Osmar, and Swenson.

  Butcher now held a commanding lead in her bid for a record fifth crown. Nome was a mere 200 miles away, and the performance
of her dogs on the windy coast was legendary. The temperature in Barrow was 30 below and falling. Snow flurries were moving south from the North Slope, and the wind was gathering off the Bering Sea Coast.

  A skinned beaver dripped blood in a bucket as it thawed. Welcome to the bush. It was about 11 P.M. as I sat down at the dinner table with Hamilton, his wife, Carolyn, and her son, Keith.

  Hamilton quizzed me about my impressions of the land I’d just crossed. The Athabaskan said he knew the area well. On his return from Vietnam, he had spent a year out there alone, running traplines out of a remote cabin. “It was a good place to think,” he said.

  Gesturing to the beaver, the villager explained that he was teaching the boy to live off the land, as he had, practicing the lifestyle known as subsistence. After dinner, Keith showed me a litter of pups, which he hoped might someday pull a sled in the great race. Then Hamilton steered me to a bunk where I grabbed a quick nap.

  Because we were traveling so far behind the race leaders, the condition of the trail worsened with each passing day, but it was paved with hospitality in Iditarod’s villages.

  Peele wasn’t a quitter. It cost him more than $700 in gas and wages, but he and his Nikolai posse tracked Charlie down. He did not begrudge the money. The dog’s harness was snagged on a bush when the searchers found him. He would surely have died without their help. But the ridiculous incident burned up more than 48 hours.

  It was Sunday night before Peele mushed into McGrath, driving what was now the unrivaled last-place team. Garth and Lee, the only mushers even close, had left McGrath at least eight hours before, and both had given their teams long breaks in the busy checkpoint.

  A reasonable man might have been discouraged. Except for Takotna, which hardly counted because it was so close to McGrath, Peele was headed into no-man’s-land. Snowmachines rarely traveled the 215 miles between McGrath and Shageluk, and a single storm could easily bury the trail, transforming his race into a trek for survival.

  But Peele didn’t have much in common with other middle-aged men. On two different occasions the tall Southerner with the shaggy white beard had stood on top of 20,030-foot Mount McKinley. He was the driven sort, a man who took up mushing in Alaska less than a month after undergoing major knee surgery. He had borrowed $40,000 from his retirement fund to pursue this Iditarod dream. The holder of the Red Lantern might have been stubborn to the point of foolishness, but you couldn’t call him a quitter.

  The weather held as Peele pushed across the barrens toward Iditarod. He didn’t find many markers left standing, but scanning the horizon with his field glasses he picked out enough to stay on course. He pushed himself relentlessly, limiting his breaks to the absolute minimum needed for the dogs. The effort seemed to be paying off when he mushed into Iditarod within four hours of Lee’s departure.

  The old geezer looked ragged to the lone race official left in town. But who wouldn’t? Radio operator Rich Runyan decided that Peele was holding up pretty well for a guy traveling alone out here — some 400 miles behind the leaders.

  CHAPTER 8. O Mighty Yukon

  Happy Trails Brian O’Donoghue.” The sign was nailed to a tall spruce. The forest was plastered with Iditarod greetings, but it was comical seeing my name sharing the same trunk with Jeff King’s, who was more than 300 miles ahead.

  Leaving the forest, the trail descended along a frozen slough, spilling into an immense white plain, interrupted only by distant folds of ice, jutting perhaps eight feet high. I sucked in my breath. This had to be the Yukon River.

  Close ahead lay the Athabaskan village of Anvik, yet the only hint of man’s presence was a string of tiny trail markers skirting the massive river’s edge. Farther out, a solitary line of trees grew from a small island, pointing like a spear at the vast white expanse.

  I felt small.

  Skidders had me concerned. My old wheel dog was limping. He was favoring a front paw, so the problem was unrelated to that cut on his rear leg. I stopped and examined him, but couldn’t identify a cause. His tug line remained taut, so I left him in the team. The old stud was still pulling — on three legs — as I mushed the team off the river into Anvik, passing the church where a bell had heralded King’s arrival four days earlier. It was Wednesday at 3:30 P.M. A crowd of shrieking children chased us to the checkpoint at the community lodge.

  Cooley’s wolves were bedded on straw outside the checkpoint. I found him inside. The vet was itching to get to Grayling, the next checkpoint, a mere 18 miles farther up the Yukon. Gunner, Williams, and Lenthar were still there, he said, waiting for us. That was great news. But I wasn’t budging from Anvik for at least two hours. My dogs were due for a break. I also needed to go shopping again. My folding Buck knife was still resting on a chair at Hamilton’s house. Replacing it was essential.

  I was mixing dog food later when the checker approached me. “A musher’s got to have a good knife out there,” said Norman McAlpine, handing me a Swiss Army knife. “Take mine.”

  Doc diagnosed Skidders’s limp as resulting from a sprained toe. “I’d take him to Grayling and see how he does,” said Cooley. “It’s not far. We can look him over again before the long haul to Eagle Island.”

  I was already dishing out dog food by the time Daily showed up. Tom’s lips were unusually pinched. Bogus, his last dependable leader, was showing signs of mutiny.

  “I don’t think Bogus wanted to run the Iditarod again,” Daily said sourly.

  Cooley tried one last time to convince Daily and me to leave with him. We declined, promising to follow before dark.

  Sixty teams had already passed through the village, accompanied by a sizable contingent of race volunteers, hotel caterers, and media people drawn by the “First Musher to the Yukon” feast. McAlpine told us to help ourselves to whatever was left from that earlier invasion. Daily and I pigged out, frying an entire pound of bacon.

  The checkpoint’s bounty included a shipment of my mother’s booties and a card from Iris, who wrote that everyone was rooting for me. Hearing from her — wow, that took me back.

  The bewitching Israeli artist was one of my favorite dance partners at the Howling Dog Saloon, Fairbanks’ rough-hewn summer showcase. Iris paid the rent by designing outdoor clothing at Apocalypse Design, a local manufacturer of expedition gear used by Butcher and other top mushers.

  One summer night during a break in the music at the Dog, Iris and I ducked outside into the bar’s big fenced yard and began talking about the gear she could make me for the race. I figured I could get away with a single custom suit. Iris argued for layered clothing.

  “What you need ees a beeb,” she said.

  “A beeb?” I said, baffled by her Israeli-accented purr.

  “A beeb for the legs. A pile vest to keep your chest warm. You’re too thin, you need the protection,” Iris said, laughing. “You should place your order now. It gets very beesy in winter.”

  I dragged Iris back toward the dance floor. It seemed much too soon to be ordering cold-weather gear. It was 70 degrees out. Volleyball games continued past midnight under the rosy midnight sun. Winter seemed a million miles away then. Now I inhabited a hostile cold world, wearing those “beebs” like a second skin.

  While the dogs snoozed, McAlpine entertained Daily and me with stories from his own 21-day Iditarod saga. The tempo of the villager’s race had been set on the first day, when he lay down for a quick nap and didn’t stir for 14 hours. It was a blunder Daily and I could well appreciate. McAlpine, for his part, understood what it was like to hunt trail markers at the far end of the Iditarod’s field. He made his 1983 trip in the company of Colonel Vaughan, who’s never been known for speed.

  “The colonel was so polite he tipped his hat to every tree,” the checker said.

  Barry Lee had ground to make up. He didn’t want to tackle the Yukon River alone, and Peele was too far behind. Feeling pressured, he hurried out of Iditarod in the early afternoon on Tuesday.

  Garth had an hour’s lead. Considering the English
man’s mad dash the night before, when he mushed his Redington dogs 90 miles without a break, Lee wasn’t at all confident that his team could close that gap. He was, at first, happily surprised when he found Garth camping roughly midway to Shageluk. But something about the scene disturbed Barry Lee. He paused to check on the Englishman’s condition.

  “I’m OK,” said Garth, peering from his sleeping bag. “I just need to sleep.”

  “Are your dogs still moving?”

  The dogs are fine, the sleepy musher assured Lee.

  Barry shrugged and continued on. He came across Kuba, a few miles later.

  “What about the other guy?” the German asked. “He seemed to be in pretty bad shape. And his dogs won’t run.”

  Lee was perplexed. Should he go back? Garth said he was all right, and he was in his sleeping bag. It was not as if he was collapsed on the trail back there. Barry Lee mushed on.

  Fresh snow was blowing. The team’s speed slipped as Lee’s dogs plowed through half a foot of powder. The musher’s low-budget approach was also costing him. He had tough white plastic on his sled runners. The white-coded material lasted longer than the softer black or orange plastic favored by most racers; it was optimum for traveling over bare, rocky terrain. In these conditions, white plastic created friction, which made Lee’s sled harder to pull. Most racers would have changed their plastic, but Lee had long ago used up the few spares he had bought in Knik.

  Barry wasn’t packing much dog food either. He didn’t plan for a dinner stop on the 65-mile run to Shageluk. Forced to camp, the musher tossed out snacks. His dogs would just have to hold out until Shageluk for a full meal.

  The checkpoint was closed when Barry mushed into the village on the morning of March 13. He found a veterinarian, but the volunteer’s plane was already revving for departure. The vet made no effort to hide his eagerness to get to Nome for the finish of the real race.