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

by Brian Patrick O'donoghue

  Terhune rested the dogs through most of Sunday, waiting for the wind to break. An opening finally came in late afternoon. He took advantage of the calm, but trail conditions proved awful. If a base existed under the waist-deep powder, the musher couldn’t find it. He was angry at his bad luck, tired, and deeply depressed. Four hundred miles distant, Nome seemed impossibly far.

  We caught Plettner’s group by midafternoon Saturday. The sky was supremely clear. The Yukon stretched before us, a broad field of glistening white bordered on either side by tiny lines of trees. Our ten-team convoy slowly inched up the massive river’s center. The place made the Big Su look like a racquetball court.

  Daily and I remained at the caboose end of the convoy. It was an extraordinary scene. The chain of dog teams stretched a half-mile or more ahead, forming a line of brightly colored caterpillars crossing a desolate white prairie. From my sled runners, I banged off pictures of the procession, catching dog teams arrayed in an arc, stretching from my wheel dogs to the trail-breakers mushing across the distant horizon.

  Sepp Herrman’s team abruptly peeled away from the convoy. “I will catch you when I please,” he shouted. Quickly and efficiently, the German made camp on the frozen river. The convoy had barely gained a mile before a wisp of smoke curled from Sepp’s cook pot.

  I’d left Eagle Island packing a full cooler of hot dog food. I fed the team a real meal during one of the convoy’s many lengthy delays. It was an eat-and-run situation. I collected the pans as fast as the dogs finished their food. As I picked up Denali’s, the ornery cuss bit my hand. Furious, I bopped him with the pan.

  “You ungrateful son of a bitch! I saved your life.”

  Watching him slink away, I realized that the earlier pack judgment was right. I resolved to drop the ungrateful slacker the moment we hit Kaltag.

  Late in the afternoon, Daily spotted Herrman’s team closing in from behind. The trapper’s reappearance drew an immediate reaction from the front of the convoy. Like the children’s game of telephone, a message was relayed from musher to musher down the line: “Send up, Sepp.”

  “Gee,” Herrman said, sending his finely trained leaders jumping out of the trench. “Haw.” The leaders executed a neat left-hand turn and bounded forward, passing us with hardly a sideways glance. I whistled in appreciation.

  “Now, that’s a dog team,” I told my own crew. “From now on that’s the kind of performance I’m going to expect from you guys.”

  The summons to the head of the convoy marked a turning point for Herrman. The long break at Eagle Island had wrought a welcome change. Tails were up. His leaders were eager to go.

  “I have a team back,” Herrman mused, watching his dogs muscle through the deep snow. He mushed past Cooley and Plettner and kept moving straight up the Yukon. Within a few minutes the convoy lurched forward again, with a noticeable burst of speed.

  Entering a slough, I saw a dog team on the side of the trail. Word passed back that it was Jon Terhune. I’d never met him before, but I noticed that the gaunt, bearded musher looked pained as the others loudly hailed him. Biting his lip, Terhune fell in behind Daily and me, driving the last dogs in line on the Iditarod Trail.

  Call it the Yukon’s farewell kiss. Rising from nowhere, a freak storm enveloped us. Even Herrman was impressed by the sudden unannounced blast. One second he was gazing at the lights of Kaltag. The next, he was battling a windstorm more intense than any he’d ever seen in the Brooks Range, a wilderness known for its extreme weather.

  Sepp’s trapline-tough dogs fought their way clear of the localized maelstrom. The rest of us slammed to a dead stop. Chaos descended on the convoy. Mushers were stomping around, yelling at their dogs and jerking lines. All for naught. Survival genes took over as the wind sent our dogs digging for shelter.

  My brain may have been foggy from fatigue, but the storm seemed to sweep us into a different surreal dimension. It wasn’t cold or frightening, just weird. Snow drifts reached out and engulfed our convoy like an advancing giant amoeba. Dogs and mushers were transformed into strange statues. Cyrus, still on his feet, whined and jerked on the gang line. My powerhouse pup didn’t like the sea of snow rising around him. Daily hugged one of his dogs, and the two melded together. I slapped myself and rubbed my eyes, but the fantasy world remained.

  Then, for the fourth time in the race, I dumped my sled and climbed inside.

  Barry Lee slept on his decision to scratch. In the morning, he again prayed while attending the Sunday service at Grayling’s Arctic Mission, but nothing was added to that “go home” message.

  Lee’s remaining doubts were resolved by a telephone conversation with Niggemyer in Nome.

  “Barry,” the race manager said, “there’s a lot of guys getting belt buckles this year who are missing pieces of themselves. I can’t help you back there.”

  Lee signed the damn papers and began dealing with the logistics of flying his dog team home from a Yukon River village. And what about that gear he’d abandoned on the river? The cooker alone was worth an easy $100. Lee, awash in the personal and financial ruins of his dream, couldn’t afford to throw away anything valuable.

  The musher tracked down Rich Runyan, who was recuperating before tackling the Yukon again. Coming out of Anvik, the wind had blown so hard, the radio operator had crouched down on the big snowmachine and barreled up the frozen river with his eyes closed. Closed! It was crazy, but he couldn’t see where he was going anyway.

  The sky was, for the moment, clear. Runyan felt sorry for Barry and agreed to help him with a salvage mission. The men disconnected the sled loaded with radio equipment and hooked Lee’s empty dogsled to the snowmachine. Riding double, they buzzed out of the village.

  The river cache was easy to find. From half a mile or more away, Lee could see two men digging his castoffs out of the drifts. It was the trapper and Bob the bicyclist. Their snowmachine had run out of gas returning down the Yukon. After walking nearly ten miles, the pair had found Lee’s tracks, followed by odd pieces of wind-blown gear. They were in the process of searching the drifts for a sled and, possibly, a body.

  Trading misadventures, the four Yukon survivors had a good laugh at each other’s expense. Runyan’s snowmachine could only carry one passenger at a time. Leaving Lee to repack the dogsled, Runyan ferried the trapper back to the village.

  Bob was in no mood to wait. Vowing to hoof it to Grayling, he strapped on Lee’s old snowshoes. Barry warned him about the screwy bindings, but Bob the bicyclist — showing the same spirit that had got him this far — wouldn’t listen. The musher smiled as he watched Bob stumble several hundred sweaty yards before finally admitting defeat. The two waited together on the river for Runyan’s return.

  “All right, who’s got my headlamp?” Terhune demanded, scanning the mushers slowly stirring in Kaltag’s mushers’ quarters.

  No one paid him much attention. Most of us were bleary-eyed, struggling to collect our thoughts and gear following painfully short naps in the bunks upstairs.

  I was depressed by the news that Barry Lee had scratched in Grayling. It was an ugly day. We hardly finished cooking dog food before the Kaltag checker, operating on orders from Iditarod, had advised us to leave using a tone appropriate for a sheriff delivering an eviction notice. Daily had called him on it, chiding the villager for being “a lackey for race headquarters.” After traveling 18 hours in storm conditions, few of us were in the mood to be rushed. Cooley had bought us the nap time, telling Iditarod headquarters that, in his opinion as a race veterinarian, an afternoon of rest was essential for the dogs.

  My first priority was to arrange for Denali’s departure. Entrusting the ungrateful mutt to the checker, I took the opportunity to phone in my third trail column. “Forget what you hear about the Last Great Race being over,” I dictated. “It’s far from over….”

  The piece recounted my Yukon adventures, from the trek with Daily and Cooley to the convoy’s night in the Arctic twilight zone. “Some people think traveling in th
e back of the Iditarod pack is a camping trip,” I concluded. “This is an ordeal.”

  Back in the newsroom, the Coach — disgusted by my miserable progress to date — was pleased as he peeked in the file and read about my argument with Daily upon leaving Eagle Island.

  “O’D might make it after all,” the Mowth announced.

  Even without my efforts, the large block of teams traveling in the rear of Iditarod’s field was attracting notice. An Anchorage television station was referring to us as “the Kaltag Ten.” The number was derived from the official standings released by race headquarters. We knew better. There were eleven Iditarod teams in our convoy. He may have ducked the hoopla in Anchorage, but Doc Cooley was an Iditarod musher now, or none of us deserved to make the claim.

  By midafternoon Sunday, the dogs had had six to eight hours of rest, which meant that nap time was over for the mushers. Weather reports carried a strong argument for haste. Another storm was coming.

  From the Yukon, the Iditarod Trail climbed a 1,000-foot pass into the Nulato Hills. According to local villagers, the snow was deep on this side of the pass, but slippery thin on the other. A party of Kaltag trappers set out on snowmachines to break a trail for us. We had to get moving before the storm erased their work.

  Tom Daily was in a lousy mood. He had squandered his nap time standing in line to make obligatory phone calls, but hadn’t spoken with anyone — no one was home. Cooley, on the other hand, was strangely buoyant. Mixing a cup of hot Tang by the stove, Doc mocked our hardships with an impromptu recital of poems by Robert Service. The performance was then interrupted by Terhune’s angry eruption.

  “If your headlamp is missing, I’m sure it’s an accident,” Cooley said.

  “Well, I’m sure it’s not,” replied Terhune. “I left it plugged in to the battery pack. That’s got my name on it. If somebody had mistaken it, they would have taken the whole thing. But the battery pack is right here,” he said, showing us the red case with his name clearly printed on the side.

  “Whoever took my headlamp, knew what they were doing,” he said, curling his lips in a feral challenge. “One of you is a thief.”

  Hard to accept, but Terhune’s logic was sound. The missing headlamp was a freebie provided by Dodge Trucks. Each of us had started the race with an identical one, meaning that there was no telling who had pinched his. No one was sleepy now, and we eyed each other uneasily.

  “I’ve got an extra one,” Catherine Mormile announced, breaking the silence. She went out to her sled to get it for Terhune. She also loaned Daily a needle and thread to sew his torn sled bag.

  “I could sure use a decent headlamp,” I said, pointing to the toy I’d bought in McGrath.

  “You need a headlamp?” said Herrman. “I’ve got an extra you can borrow.”

  The trappers were waiting at a rushing open creek a few miles out of Kaltag. Helping hands threw reluctant leaders into the frigid water. More hands were waiting on the other side to pluck our soggy fur balls and steer them onto the trail. The villagers’ teamwork reminded me of crossing Sullivan Creek with Garth and Lee — both now gone.

  Once again the Red Lantern belonged to Tom Daily, who followed me out of Kaltag. Crossing the creek, his team tangled. Daily got soaking wet straightening out the mess.

  “Be careful,” one of the trappers told him. “The storm coming is the worst I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”

  “Great, that’s just wonderful,” said Daily, who by now expected no less from the gods. Though his response was cavalier, Tom noticed that the trappers were geared to the teeth.

  Daily generally traveled at night with his headlamp off. But he didn’t want to lose me, and his team kept falling behind. Meanwhile, I kept overtaking the teams bunched ahead. So we worked out a system. Rather than creep in step with the convoy. I took a lot of breaks. Each time I rested with my back on the handlebar, shining my headlamp back toward Kaltag, watching for telltale blinks in the darkness — confirming that Moon-shadow’s musher remained on the march.

  We were hit climbing a steep sidehill. Herman’s team shrugged off the frigid breeze rushing up the bare slope, and he made it through the pass. But several of the teams directly behind Sepp balked. The delay caused the dogs to start digging for shelter, shutting the rest of us down like toppling dominoes.

  We struggled for maybe 30 minutes — through steadily increasing wind — trying to get the convoy moving. Mushers in the front switched their leaders. They tried dragging dogs forward by hand. Finally, half a dozen of us got together and attempted to walk those teams that were willing past those that wouldn’t budge. It was slow difficult work. The trail’s slippery groove, cut sideways into the slope, was impossibly narrow. The hill, terrifically steep. Heavy sleds kept tipping over and slipping, dragging drivers and wheel dogs downward; while other mushers grappled to arrest the slides.

  Our attempt at hand-guiding teams up the sidehill was abandoned when we heard Catherine Mormile cry out.

  “Don, help me. Help, help me please,” she pleaded. “I’m cold.”

  Wind piercing Mormile’s sweaty snowmachine suit had turned its clammy interior freezing cold. Shivering, she had fumbled for her sleeping bag, then panicked when she couldn’t get it open.

  Cooley took charge. “Has anybody got hand warmers?”

  We clustered around Catherine Mormile’s sled, blocking the wind with our backs. Kneeling within the ring of parkas, Cooley stripped off the stricken musher’s boots and wet socks. He slipped on dry socks, loaded with fresh warmers. Then we guided Mormile into her sleeping bag. Daily stripped off his own gloves and fitted them on her hands. Through it all, Don Mormile stood by looking rather helpless.

  Feeling the warm glow of the chemical heaters, Catherine was stricken with another sort of fear. “Does this mean I’m disqualified because I can’t take care of myself anymore?” she asked, sobbing.

  We laughed with relief. “Catherine,” someone said, mock-seriously, “We’re going to have to confiscate your promotional mail packet.”

  The crisis derailed our efforts to escape the hill.

  Daily crawled inside his sled bag in full gear, spreading his sleeping bag over the top as a blanket. He was warm, but spent a miserable night racked by cramps.

  Determined to feed my dogs a decent meal, I carved a hole in the side of the hill and formed a windscreen over the cooker with my body and the sled. It was only marginally successful. Although I burned twice the normal amount of alcohol, it only produced a tepid pot of water. The dogs didn’t seem too impressed by my hillside cuisine.

  Frustration set in as I sought refuge in my sled bag for the fifth time. Nibbling on a salmon belly cheered me a little, but gloom invaded the cocoon. What a screwed up run. Fifteen miles and we were shut down again. At this rate, Nome would be another 20 days away. The novelty of the convoy action had worn off, and Terhune’s grumbling was making a lot of sense. I might not have the fastest team, but the Coach and I had trained our dogs better than to quit midway up a hill.

  Atop the pass, Sepp Herrman mushed through a churning white-out. The German woodsman had never seen anything like it: as fast as his leaders might break a path, the surging drifts filled it back in, pressing inward against the dogs and sleds following behind.

  That didn’t stop his team. Sepp’s dogs were accustomed to breaking their own trails through untraveled back country. The team dogs kept moving, carving their own footholds, and his sled crashed through the amassing barriers.

  The trail here served more than occasional racers. This was the Kaltag Portage, an ancient transit route linking Yukon River villagers with residents of the Bering Sea coast. The route was marked by a line of tall wooden tripods, closely spaced for blinding conditions such as these. They made all the difference here, freeing Sepp to marvel at the sheer savagery of the passage.

  It was cold. The trapper possessed such pride in his own handmade, richly lined gear that it was rare that he would make such an admission, even to himself. But
Sepp Herrman was also a realist, a man who understood the bloodthirsty nature of wolves and the dangers of harboring illusions about Alaska’s cruel environment. It was exceptionally cold tonight. That was the enormous thing.

  Deviating from my usual routine, I left my bunny boots outside the sled overnight. It made my sled bag hotel a little more roomy.

  It was calm in the morning, but the 30-below temperature carried a bite. My toes burned the instant I stepped into the stiff rubber boots. I launched into a series of frenzied jumping jacks, chanting “ouch, ouch, ouch” the whole time. From here on out, this traveler would be sleeping with his boots on.

  When we were loaded and ready, the convoy resumed inching up the sidehill trail. The powder atop the pass proved too deep for Plettner’s team, and Cooley’s leaders were still soured. Word was relayed back: “Send up Daily.”

  Tom strapped on his snowshoes and placed Diamond in the lead. The musher stomped a path through the biggest drifts. His old lead dog tackled the rest. It was hard work, but Daily felt good about Diamond’s performance. The old dog was cruising at speeds nearing two miles an hour. For Diamond, that was flying. Together they broke a new trail, following the weathered tripods across the windswept plateau.

  As usual, my worst problem was getting Harley past old campsites. The big dog’s concentration was destroyed by even a speck of discarded food. Mushers were supposed to pull their teams off the trail before stopping for a snack or rest. Obviously, our forced camp on the hillside was an unusual situation. I had fed my dogs on the trail there, same as everybody else. But it was evidently standard procedure for several of the teams ahead. I’d been stumbling over fresh dining stains ever since leaving Eagle Island. I dragged Harley by the collar up the hill, making frequent, aggravating pauses to right my sled.