Looking for Alaska

by Peter Jenkins

  Jeff was forty-four years old. It had been a long trail for him, starting in northern California where he had grown up, even played quarterback at Shasta Junior College at five feet eight, 140 pounds. He’d bought his first land bordering Denali Park in 1977. He did not dream of being a professional sled-dog racer, one of the greatest winners ever. His plan was simply to live in Alaska, and to do whatever it took to stay. But watching him today hollering to no one but himself and his dogs, expressing his feelings of pure joy at running through spruce and powder, was to see why he loved this life. Put him in a race and he and his dogs want to beat you. But between the beginning of the race and the end he loves what he’s doing, he draws great inspiration from the act itself. He will never regret the life he has chosen because once he found it, it is what he wanted more than anything else. Even if he gets as old as Kitty and he’s limping around, he will remember. He will hear the excitement of the dogs. He may watch one of his daughters cross the finish line in Nome someday.

  I wished we could have stayed longer with Kate and Larry at their kingdom with the hundred-mile view, but we made the run back to the road. We got back and the dogs acted as if they wanted more. That’s okay—Jeff and these dogs had a couple thousand miles to go before the winter of 2000 was over.

  THE RACE

  March 4 arrived. It was a day of excitement all over Alaska. The “last great race” would have its ceremonial start in Anchorage. Sometimes crews actually had to haul snow into Anchorage if there wasn’t enough snow on the main streets so the eighty-one mushers could begin. Most of the mushers were from Alaska; places like Point Hope, Seward, Fairbanks, Two Rivers, Big Lake, Willow, Moose Pass, Kasilof, Nenana, Trapper Creek, Healy, and Kotzebue. There was a wild-looking guy named Fedor Konyukhov from Moscow, and others from Outside: Germany, England, Michigan, Australia, Canada, Colorado, even a former professional wrestler from Minnesota. There was Charlie Boulding, with his chest-length gray beard and long gray braids, a former southern country boy who had the aw-shucks aura of a southerner at Woodstock. People said he had been Special Forces or an army Ranger, he was as tough as a frigid hell. Some said this was Charlie’s year to win. He’d beaten Jeff in the Kuskokwim 300; his best finish at the Iditarod was third in 1998, when Jeff had last won. In 1999, he had beaten Jeff; Charlie had come in fifth, Jeff seventh. Knowing Jeff, if I had a million dollars to bet, I would have bet he did better than seventh this year. Although seven is a special number, it’s too far from number one for Jeff.

  An equipment and food drop in Unalakleet along the Iditarod Trail during the 2000 Iditarod Race. PHOTO BY PETER JENKINS

  Even though he was from far away, South Carolina to be exact, veterinarian Sonny King was back. He was well liked by Alaskans because he had paid his dues working as a veterinarian on the Iditarod and he smiles, yet steadily improves. Doug Swingley, the gunslinger from Montana, had ridden in on his black horse, in his black hat and black chaps. In one breath he is talking humbly about being the seventeenth member of his dog team (everyone begins with sixteen dogs—no substitutions are allowed, but injured or exhausted dogs are dropped along the way at checkpoints and flown back to Anchorage), while in another breath Doug is predicting a win and a race speed record, Joe Namath-style. Doug won last year; so far he’s run the Iditarod eight times and won twice. He holds the record for the fastest time, nine days, two hours, and forty-two minutes. I’m sure there are people in Alaska who root for Swingley, but since he’s the only musher from a state other than Alaska to have won, you won’t find many fans. People who know dogs say he has an incredible team and that he has pioneered long-distance training, some days running 150 miles. Even the president of the Anchorage Rotary Club was running the race. Jeff would never say anything publicly or to me, but I know Doug was one of his main motivations for wanting to win, to have an Alaskan, preferably himself, take back the mantle of the winner of the last great race.

  On Sunday, March 5, the real race began in Wasilla. The eighty-one mush-ers would depart every two minutes, headed to Knik, where there was the Knik Bar. Every year Alaska folksinger and my friend Hobo Jim sang the Iditarod song he had written, “I did, I did, I did the Iditarod Trail,” for the rowdy crowd there. We saw Jeff start thirty-sixth, while Shawn Sidelinger, running the puppy team, started thirty-fifth. Bryan Imus, a rookie who had loaned Jeff his super-dog, Yuksi, started fifty-fourth. Doug Swingley started one behind Paul Gephardt, the carpenter from the Kenai Peninsula. Jerry Riley, the 1976 champion, an Athabascan from the interior, was telling people he was back. He was around sixty years old and tough enough to whip up on the twenty-somethings. Twenty-somethings don’t win the Iditarod. Middle-aged humans excel; it seems to take experience to master it. The gray-pigtailed, happy-eyed Charlie Boulding, the sly fox, began last. The weather was considered warm today, in the thirties; Jeff took it slow, didn’t care who passed him.

  This year, an even year, the race went from Wasilla to Knik. After Knik there would be no way to drive to any place on the Iditarod Trail, and Knik was only fourteen miles from Wasilla. From there it is eighty-six miles to Skwentna, then through Finger Lake, a checkpoint in a tent. Then over Rainy Pass, at 3,160 feet the highest place on the mushers’ trail, unless they started hallucinating several days into the race. Then to Rohn, which is a steep downhill that leaves behind the Alaska Range, of which Mount McKinley is a part. The trail from Rohn to Nikolai, a Native village of a hundred or so, is one of the toughest stretches. It’s ninety-three miles through an area where there was once a large wildfire; they call it Farewell Bunn. Then it’s west toward the Kuskokwim Mountains and McGrath. Racers must take a twenty-four-hour break; many take theirs at the checkpoint in McGrath. McGrath has been having problems with wolves coming around town and eating its dogs.

  The musher from Montana has introduced a new tactic. Among the elite fifteen or twenty mushers, this race is like a radical form of chess. Teams that want to win try to make surprising moves to weaken their competitors and suck away their fighting spirit. One adage is, never let your competitors see you. Play every head game you can, even just enough to be a pinprick in their balloon of fight. In the last few years, Doug Swingley has been pushing and pushing. His team are such extraordinary athletes, so well trained. He tries to get so far ahead before he takes his twenty-four-hour break that few feel they can catch up.

  From McGrath, it’s on to Takotna, then Ophir, a ghost town. Cripple is the halfway point and the first one there collects some money, $3,000. From Cripple it’s a long route to Ruby. First dog team to Ruby, the musher gets a gourmet meal prepared by one of Alaska’s best chefs.

  All along the route, at every checkpoint there are vets and race officials, making sure the dogs are fine and that no musher is in trouble. Before the Iditarod every dog must get an EKG and have blood work done by race-hired technicians. I went with Jeff when he had all his dogs tested in Healy. From Ruby they go to Galena, then Nulato, then to Kaltag. These 150 miles are run on the Yukon River.

  Jeff said he had been preparing a secret weapon for this flat, boring stretch. The dogs and he need inspiration at about that point, close to six hundred miles into the race. Everyone needs to stay motivated. Jeff had been experimenting with hooking up some speakers on his sled and playing music for the dogs. Jeff studies every angle. Pavlov, a noted animal behaviorist, who played music to milk cows to improve their milk output, discovered animals respond favorably to good music. Jeff wanted to play his dogs some Marshall Tucker Band, among others, to pick up their steps, fire up their high-performing spirits.

  People all over Alaska followed the intricate details of each day, some checking in for several updates a day. The Anchorage Daily News, the Fairbanks News Miner, provided daily details of each musher. There were features on the unusual, the inspirational. One guy running the race was HIV-positive. There were citizens analyzing the difference between run times between Rohn and Nikolai. You can overhear someone in Barnes & Noble in Anchorage buying a book on yoga saying to the pers
on making a mocha, “Can you believe Rick Swenson [a five-time champion] was less than an hour behind Swingley into Ophir?” The high school student with long blond hair making the mocha might respond, “I don’t know about that, but Ramy Brooks sure is hot.”

  Following the Iditarod becomes a ten-day addiction, even two weeks if you know someone back in the pack. You want every source you can find. The Iditarod Web site has times and departures. You keep your map of the route handy, preferably on your refrigerator. You click on Cabela’s Web site and read columns from the outstanding Joe Runyan, the John Madden of mushing commentators. Reading Joe Runyan’s pieces on Cabela’s daily race coverage was an excellent way to get a feel for the ever-changing dynamics of the leaders. Joe is an Iditarod winner and comments with an authenticity that only comes from having raised dogs, mushed, competed, and won. Plus, the mushers, a tough, sometimes stoic group, trust Joe far more than most media types. For example, here’s an excerpt about the Yukon River: “The Yukon River is big, expansive, and complicated with dead-end oxbow sloughs and wide channels that divert for miles in endless excursions from the main channel. A musher should heed the warning ‘Follow the markers.’ ‘Just follow the river, you can’t get lost’ is the worst piece of advice that you could take under your hat. From the surface of the Yukon, it is immense, like a lake. Hidden behind islands, one could never imagine that an entirely different part of the braided system of channels comprising the Yukon exists quite apart from the reality you envision. It is not inconceivable at all, in the moonless dark, to be entirely turned around. Great stories of adventurers traveling the river and finding themselves at a previous village several days later are not uncommon.”

  One night Joe’s “Evening Appraisal” read, “Jeff King is still driving a very fast team and will depart almost arm in arm with Rick Swenson. When I talked with Jeff, he conceded that Swingley held a significant lead but pointed out that he had leaders that could travel even in the winds purported to be developing on the Bering Sea coast.”

  And since Alaska is the world’s largest small town, Alaskans not only follow their top choice, but several other mushers they know, dislike, have dated, or been married to (keeping track of their prize money), and perhaps some of their uncle’s or neighbor’s or friend’s dogs.

  From Kaltag the trail veers off the Yukon River through mountains and valleys to the coast and Unalakleet. The first one to Unalakleet receives gold from the National Bank of Alaska. Next comes the Eskimo village of Shaktoolik, where the trail goes out onto the frozen ocean. There are still 229 miles to Nome and the finish line.

  After all this racing across the totally unpredictable Alaskan wilderness, there could be only minutes separating the top teams. The race at this point calls for every racer’s all-out push. Thousands of dollars in prize money separates first from second from third. The champions’ hearts are showing, refusing to give. The word from the knowledgeable was that Paul Gephardt’s lead dog was such a competitor that he refused even to lie down when the team stopped to rest. He just sat up, powerful chest and front legs supporting his huge heart. He would be named top lead dog at the awards banquet in Nome.

  From Shaktoolik it’s down the windswept trail of sea ice to Koyuk, then Elim, Golovin, and White Mountain. Mushers must take an eight-hour break here, seventy-seven miles from the finish. Then it’s on to Safety and Nome. Every time a musher comes down Main Street in Nome the fire sirens go off all over town, whether it’s noon, 2:31 A.M., or 4:44 A.M.

  * * *

  Doug Swingley won the 2000 Iditarod with the fastest time ever, nine days, fifty-eight minutes, and six seconds. He won $60,000 and another new Dodge truck. Jeff’s team got some flu bug early on, which caused him to stop and take his twenty-four-hour layover much sooner than he had hoped. After almost twelve hundred miles of some of the most radical landscape in the world, Paul Gephardt was just five hours and two minutes behind Doug for second. His prize money was $52,500. Jeff and his team came in seven hours and forty-two minutes behind Doug, just two hours and forty minutes behind Paul. Ramy Brooks, 1999’s Yukon Quest champion, a young charger, was just thirty-six minutes behind Jeff. Charlie, his long gray beard flying in the wind, came in fifth. Every musher and every dog that ran, raced, covered so much of Alaska, will never forget his or her own accomplishment. Running the 2000 Iditarod will become one of his or her most powerful memories, quietly recalled, drawn upon for inspiration.

  After the racing season of 2000 ended, later that year, before the short Alaskan summer, Kitty just couldn’t go on any longer. She passed away, having faded slowly, a supreme creature who had lived a life any racing dog would have loved.

  12

  Maximum Security

  I never thought we could get trapped in Seward by avalanches, but in January, we did. It showed us what can happen when there is just one road out. An avalanche occurs, blanketing that road with piles and piles of snow; the one road gets closed down, and you’re a prisoner. Although we had been stranded now four or five days, we had power most of the time; Seward has its own power generators. Just knowing we absolutely could not leave Seward, though, got to me. I was on edge and so was Rita; we are people who need to move.

  Several communities between here and Anchorage—Hope, Moose Pass, and Girdwood—were in worse shape than we were. They had lost their electricity, and people with private generators were running out of gas. A group of women had driven to Girdwood, a ski resort community not far from Anchorage, for one of their birthdays and had been unable to get out. One of them kissed the chartered helicopter that finally came to get them. In Seward we’d gotten maybe four feet of snow in the past four days, maybe more. Alaska has plenty of outrageous weather that never makes the news, but after the whole Kenai Peninsula was blocked by avalanches for a couple of days, we even made some national newscasts.

  Alaska is such a surprising place. Many of the things I thought about Alaska before I got here turned out in reality to be the opposite of what I’d expected. I thought summer would be a time for soaring, easy travel, for going all over the place. But the opposite was true. Summer was a time to let the sunlight soak into your life-giving batteries, to warm your face, to stay around the home place. It is the time to gather your fish and berries and earn your living wage.

  It is when Alaska changes its relationship with sun, when winter comes and things freeze, that true freedom comes. It is a freedom of movement and a freedom from fear. As the sun gets farther away, it grows colder and darker. There is so much water flowing or standing still in Alaska, over 3 million lakes of over twenty acres each and more than three thousand rivers, not counting the ponds and small lakes and creeks and springs and swamps and other wetlands. All of these things make travel difficult when the water is not frozen. But the cold freezes the water, even the salt water.

  Before Alaska freezes, the bears are not hibernating. Who knows when you might run into one in the dense undergrowth, lying around a kill site, waiting for its moose meat to age. Unfortunately, though, sometimes, when just the right conditions occur, winter traps us.

  Out in a neighborhood called Questa Woods, where Julianne’s friend Danielle lived, there looked to be seven feet of snow on some of the roofs. People stood on the roofs shoveling off the snow; it was taller than they were. I had heard someone call it Snow Acres. Whether you were up against our mountainside or out in the middle of the valley could make a drastic difference in the snowfall you received. In the valley, they may have had a third as much snow as we did even though they were only five miles from us.

  We were told that this year the millions and billions of tons of snow that had floated to earth were resting on a slippery, icy base. What had not avalanched already could go at any time. Still we were unafraid. I had never known anyone who had been affected by an avalanche until this week. Like an unending snowfall, the avalanches kept falling. Workers would clean them up with dozers and other heavy equipment, and more snow would take its place. Avalanches would cover the road in
places where no one could remember them coming down before or right next to where they’d cleaned up the last one.

  If we rode about twenty miles or so out of town, we could see what had us walled in. Although I knew all this avalanche stuff was true—it was in the Anchorage Daily News—I wanted to see it. I called the local State Troopers office often and asked for updates. The woman in the office was relaxed and witty. She told me one day early on that someone had called in to report that some vehicle tracks went into one side of the avalanche that did not come out the other end. Could there be a car and people trapped under all that? A state trooper checked it out; I guess he had to walk up and over it and look on foot. Turned out the wind had blown the tracks clear on the far side. The heavy equipment whose task it was to free us could only remove one snow pile at a time. There were hundreds of avalanches in the 125 miles between here and Anchorage; several had made it to the road, leaving behind anywhere from a few feet to sixteen feet of snow.