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 Englishman’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.
Lee’s anxiety was heightened by the Iditarod official’s impatience. Catching Daily and me was becoming absolutely urgent, or so the musher decided. Making a snap decision, he scrapped plans to cook his dogs a meal here and — minutes after arriving in Shageluk — Lee bolted for Anvik. Barry thought the Yukon village lay a mere 18 miles ahead. But he was confusing the upcoming run with the short hop to Grayling. The distance to Anvik was closer to 30 rugged miles.
Up and down the Iditarod Trail, Lee and other weary mushers were making costly mistakes. The grace period was over. Alaska, ever remorseless, indifferent to mortal ambitions, was about to remind us that the games played here are hers alone to call.
Peele found the cabin at Iditarod stifling hot. He slept poorly, wishing he could speed up dawn’s approach. He, too, felt rushed. But it didn’t make sense trying to leave the old ghost town in the dark. Late in the second week of the race, the tape on the trail markers was often so frosted that it was no longer reflective, or it was torn off entirely by the wind. Assuming, of course, that a particular marker was standing at all for the Iditarod’s Red Lantern musher.
Morning brought the light Peele wanted. It also brought wind, and the team smacked into drifts soon after leaving Iditarod. Seeking a boost, Peele dug out his personal stash of caffeine tablets. “This is worth one or two cups of coffee,” the musher told himself, swallowing the first pill.
Radio operator Rich Runyan was supposed to close down the checkpoint at Iditarod, then follow the last team over to Shageluk on a snowmachine, towing a sled packed with his electronic gear. He was going to accompany the rear teams through to Unalakleet, a distance of about 350 miles.
The plan had sounded reasonable back at race headquarters. The radio operator from Anchorage hadn’t given it much thought while mushers were still on the way to his remote post. His attitude changed after Peele had mushed away Wednesday morning. Listening to the wind, Runyan felt growing flickers of dread. He was alone. Left behind out in the wilderness. Runyan knew his fears were foolish. If he needed to, for any reason, he could fire up his generator-powered radio and talk to the world. This knowledge wasn’t enough to dispel the camp’s eerie silence, or the whispers from the dark corners of his mind.
By late afternoon, the demons were gaining strength, adding urgency to the volunteer’s packing. He keyed the big snowmachine to life. After an agonizing second, the engine caught. Rich Runyan savored that beautiful roar. His confidence surged as he quickly overtook Peele a few miles from the checkpoint. Though his team was crawling, Peele appeared in reasonably good spirits, or so it seemed to Runyan, who gladly accepted the musher’s offer of fruit juice. After a brief pause, the radio operator bid the musher and his dogs good-bye and took off, his big snowmachine cutting a new trail through the mounting drifts.
During his second trip up McKinley, nearly a decade before, Peele had frozen his hands so badly that several fingers had turned black. None had to be amputated, but he lost a good deal of feeling, and his hands remained more sensitive to cold weather. Peele wasn’t thinking clearly in the hours after Runyan left him. Fatigue and determination combined to induce a sort of madness in the musher. Battling to stay awake, he kept popping caffeine pills. And the musher took off his gloves, figuring that the pain of gripping his icy handlebar would keep him alert.
In the front of the pack, Susan Butcher weighed the risk. A ground blizzard was raging over the ice ahead. These were extreme, life-threatening conditions. Sixty-mile-per-hour winds and temperatures to 30 below combined to produce a wind-chill factor in the 100-below-zero range. Rather than attempt the exposed 40-mile crossing to Koyuk, Iditarod’s leader took refuge in a shelter cabin below Lonely Hill, the last finger of land overlooking Norton Bay.
Butcher had mushed from Shaktoolik holding a 45-minute lead over Swenson. He, Osmar, Buser, and Barve caught her at a shelter cabin, where she spent six hours waiting for the wind to drop.
King and Jonrowe left Shaktoolik together, about four and a half hours after Butcher. The storm, moving inland, made for slow going. The pair hadn’t got far before they were overtaken by Joe Runyan, whose swift, strong dogs were refreshed after a long rest. Jeff and Dee Dee spurred their teams to chase the tall musher from Nenana, but his team was faster and vanished into the swirling tempest. The storm intensified, at last forcing the pair to turn back.
Joe Runyan spied the camping teams as he approached the shelter cabin at Lonely Hill just before dark. If I can slip by here, he thought, I just might take it. He quietly crept past. For a moment, the wily former champion thought that he might actually escape unnoticed, but then he saw someone — probably from a news agency — running for the cabin door.
Out on the exposed ice, Runyan’s breakaway was hampered when his headlamp blinked out. The musher shed his gloves to fix it. Wind instantly burned his moist bare hands. He knew he had to watch it or he’d get frostnipped. Cursing himself for such unprofessional carelessness, Joe put his gloves back on and dug out a spare headlamp. He beat the others to Koyuk, but Joe Runyan’s appetite for risk was tempered by that close call.
Nature was keeping the game close. But Susan’s team remained unquestionably the strongest. The Butch led the pack out of Koyuk at 7:30 A.M. on Wednesday.
The storm rolled backward along the Iditarod Trail. John Barron left Unalakleet in eighteenth place, behind the same pair of young leaders who had guided his team to victory in the balmy Klondike 200. In the village whose Eskimo name means “where the east wind blows,” his leaders were overmatched. Frightened by the gale, they swung his team back toward the shelter of the village, spinning his sled in a circle. Barron’s fourteenth Iditarod ended with that futile dance in the wind, less than 300 miles from Nome. This was his best dog team ever, but the dogs’ coats were just too thin for a storm like this.
Barron grew protective when a reporter asked for the names of his reluctant lead dogs. “I don’t want to say their names,” he said. “Put John Barron. It’s John Barron’s fault. Dogs don’t make mistakes. The dogs don’t quit. It’s always the musher. If there’s a problem, it’s me.”
The radio operator found Garth still wrapped in his sleeping bag. The Englishman hadn’t budged since Lee had passed the previous day. Garth had been stuck in the same spot more than 36 hours and accepted that his race was finished.
The Englishman assured Rich Runyan that he wasn’t in any immediate danger of dying. But he was critically low on dog food, and his team still wouldn’t budge. A previous snowmachiner had promised to send back a rescue party from Shageluk. Garth asked Runyan to make sure that the word got through.
The radio operator pulled back on the throttle and shot into the darkness. He was tired and hungry, but Shageluk couldn’t be more than a few hours away.
It was blowing in the hills, covering the trail with loose snow. Runyan repeatedly strayed off course. Each time he got lost, he circled in a widening arc until he found new markers or some sign of the packed trail. It was hard work. The radio operator grew sweaty muscling his big machine through the soft snow. But he was, at least, making progress. Then he smacked a deep, soft drift, firmly planting the nose of the big machine in the snow. The radio operator settled down to await the rescue party Garth had summoned earlier.
Wind, snow, more wind, Peele felt that he was holding his own — until the weather went completely crazy. Rain suddenly poured from the sky. It lasted about 30 seconds, ending as the temperature dive-bombed from zero to 20 below in the time it takes to flip a coin.
Peele was dripping wet, exhausted, and feeling feverish — not to mention cold. His hands were stiff. He couldn’t make them work. He was beaten, temporarily at least, and tried to unzip his sled bag, intending to climb inside and warm himself. The zipper was jammed with ice. The musher realized he had to get out of the wind. The only shelter available was the sled itself. Huddling on the sled’s lee side, Peele wondered if he was going to die. Getting out the tape recorder he carried in his suit, Bill Peele recorded a message to his wife.
“C’mon, Barry, it’s only eighteen miles,” I told Lee. “Come with us.”
Lee could only wish. He knew too much about sled dogs to risk pushing his exhausted, dehydrated bunch any farther. Daily and I weren’t planning to leave Grayling before morning. Lee figured that gave him time to rejoin us for the long Yukon passage. Daily wanted to stay longer, but felt that he had better run for it while there was a strong team ahead. He’d lost all faith in Bogus.
“Can I follow you?” he asked me. “The only way I’ll get to Nome is behind you.”
The temperature was above zero. Cool, but nice. The gray light was dimming as Barry pulled Rainy and Harley by the neck line toward the street.
“It’s supposed to be blowin’ pretty hard out on the river,” a villager said, while Lee waved good-bye to us.
I was wearing the snowmachine suit over my bibs and about three inches of inner vests and pile garments. The warm layering was standard procedure by now. My parka remained stowed in the sled. The Burn was the only place I’d needed the heavy coat. Leaving Anvik, which was nestled between sheltering hills, there didn’t appear to be any cause for taking unusual precautions. Night was approaching, but I didn’t notice so much as a breeze.
It was as if the Yukon sensed our presence. The wind rose like an angry grizzly and howled in our faces. Harley and Rainy dropped their ears and looked for a place to escape. The entire team sagged under the wind’s terrific onslaught. My dogs were on the verge of curling into balls. Running to the head of the team, I threw Harley, then Rainy, into the wind.
Steeled by my demands, Harley clawed forward on the rock-hard snow, dragging along his more reluctant comrades. Rainy did her part as well, nudging the big dog toward the faint marks left by previous teams. The short 18-mile run became a hellish five-hour march. When I wasn’t terrified by the weather, I was appalled by Skidders’s torturous limp. The old dog never let up for an instant, pulling like a champion, but at what cost?
At least it wasn’t snowing, or the trail would have vanished in drifts. And, thank God, it wasn’t any colder. Smarting from windburn, I parked my team across from the Grayling community hall. Daily skidded to a stop close by and staggered from his sled. It was near midnight. There was plenty of straw from the earlier teams. My dogs sniffed through it, pawing together satisfactory nests, then plunked down. In seconds, most were calmly licking their paws. I was reeling myself. That tiny chunk of the Yukon had beat us up, and we faced 130 more miles on that river. The thought made me shudder.
The only Iditarod team in the village belonged to Doc. Williams and Lenthar had apparently left Grayling at roughly the same time that we had pulled out of Anvik. Well, let them go. I’d seen all I wanted of the river that night.
Cooley was ensconced on the carpet of the local kindergarten classroom, one of his perks as an Iditarod official. He was disappointed to hear that Lee had stayed behind. The three of us were rooting for Barry to catch up, but we knew his chances were slim against that wind.
I dragged Doc outside to examine Skidders. Afterward, the veterinarian advised me that the veteran sled dog’s minor toe-sprain wasn’t necessarily cause to drop him. “Maybe so, but it’s killing me to watch him.” I petted him as he licked that sore foot. “You got me to the Yukon old man, I think you deserve a vacation.” I resolved to ship Skidders home in the morning.
Back in the community hall, Daily stoked the barrel stove until the room resembled a dry sauna. Gear steamed from the rafters. I stretched out on a bench table and soaked in the heat, trying to absorb every possible calorie before our next scheduled bout with the Yukon.
Daily had the blues. He wasn’t sure he could face that wind again. He considered scratching. Why be macho about it? He and Fidaa could be in Hawaii right now. With such thoughts on his mind, Tom went out to check on his dogs. He struck up a conversation with a local musher, an Athabaskan who bragged he’d been raised on a dog sled. The Indian was a bitter man. He’d dreamed of running the Iditarod himself, but he said he couldn’t find sponsors.
Daily was convinced that the villager was wrong. Any musher supporting a twenty-dog kennel ought to be able to scrape together the extra cash to run the Iditarod. Get that race experience, he told the man, and then shop for sponsors. The villager wouldn’t listen. He wasn’t interested in merely running the race. He planned to be a contender. Money was all he needed, the villager was sure of that.
Daily left the musher stewing in his bitterness. The conversation reminded Tom how lucky he was. Bring on the Yukon, Hawaii could wait.
Two players were left in the Great Game.
As the defending champ prepared to leave Elim, another dog team was visible on the horizon. Butcher told KTUU’s television crew that she hoped it was Swenson. “I think it would be nice. We’re both going for our fifth. Why should I race against Runyan? I don’t respect him the way I respect Swenson. It’s fun to see Rick coming strong.”
The odds favored Susan. Rick hadn’t won the race since 1982. That was a different era, one in which the Iditarod’s champ could confidently boast to Shelley Gill that he would eat his sneakers if a woman ever won the race. But in this year’s race Swennie was fighting to the last mile. He was the driver on the horizon at Elim. He pushed through the checkpoint there without stopping and, 26 miles later in Golovin, he was still tracking the Butch like a crazed wolf stalking a polar bear.
For seven years running, the Iditarod had been won by the first musher into White Mountain, where teams rested a mandatory six hours before sprinting for the finish line, 77 miles ahead. Butcher was poised to make it eight straight as she checked in at 7:30 P.M. on Wednesday night.
Her last challenger, losing ground, didn’t reach White Mountain until 8:38 P.M. Asked by a TV crew if he still had a chance, Rick Swenson snorted with disgust. “You guys have got to be realistic,” he said. “Christsake, you got a team that’s way stronger than mine, and I’m an hour behind her. Only a lightning bolt or something is going to allow me to catch her.”
Butcher, camped nearby, radiated confidence as she evaluated her team against the competition. “I’m faster and I’m stronger,” she said. “The dogs are happy. They love the coast.”
Midnight was approaching in Anvik. Leaving the village, Barry Lee’s dogs trotted along briskly. They were refreshed by their five-hour rest. It was the musher who wasn’t ready for the raging wind that met his team on the dark river. Barry’s cheap parka wasn’t the greatest. And the blowing powder reduced visibility to almost nothing. The trail would sure be easier to find in the morning. That decided it. Awarding this round to the Yukon, Lee returned to Anvik.
To us, waiting in Grayling, the news of Barry’s retreat seemed like a death knell to his chances. The gap was only 18 miles, but we couldn’t risk further delay. Outside, a blizzard was forming.
“Are you absolutely sure about this, Doc?” I shouted, mushing from the village.
The wolf pack was breaking trail. Daily’s team held the rear. My dogs were sandwiched in the middle. There was no wind, no sound, just torrents of fat flakes cascading from above, so thick I could hardly breathe.
Cooley laughed. “Oh yeah,” he said. “We can handle it.” His leaders were amazing. “Gee, haw, gee, gee. That’s right. Go ahead.” Cooley directed the wolf pack marker by marker, and our three teams crawled ever deeper into a featureless white sea.
An hour out of Grayling, the snowfall was replaced by a series of wind storms. The sky would darken ahead. A churning white wall would then roll down the river and envelop us, and we couldn’t see past the wheel dogs. As quickly as they came, the storms passed on. In the breaks between them, the Yukon stretched before us, a massive alley through the wilderness.
We traveled miles without seeing official trail markers. We relied on cut branches thrust into the snow with unnatural regularity. We guessed that snowmachiners had left these crude guideposts for the same purpose. There was no trail here. If one ever existed on this seldom-traveled stretch of the Yukon, it was forever lost now, buried by two to three feet of powder.
Daily had an old leader named Diamond. The dog was painfully slow and hadn’t been much use on good trails, but he took orders with the precision of a marine — the perfect recommendation for this job. So Tom and Cooley rotated the point position. Mushing through the waves of changing weather and beautifully strange light, Tom felt cleansed of his recent blues. Thanks to Diamond, he had something to contribute in this stormy dimension.
It was my turn to feel useless. Neither Rainy nor Harley was much good as a command leader where trails weren’t apparent. If I were on my own, it would have been snowshoe time. Rat was usually a good chaser. I put her in lead with Chad to give Rainy and Harley a break. It was warm, at least zero under a clearing bright sky. Cooley accelerated nearing a bend in the river, taking advantage of snow hardened by the wind. Rat kept bumping into Chad. He abruptly sat down.
Concealing my worry, I played with Chad until he decided to humor me. I moved down the line, petting heads and massaging necks until everybody was happy. “All right!” I yelled, catching the sled as it passed.
Both Daily and Cooley had vanished around the curve. As far as Rat was concerned, that canceled the chase. She quit next.
Watching the other teams pull away, I had almost cried out, “Wait, don’t leave me!” Pride held my tongue, and now Tom and Doc were gone. I was alone on the Yukon fearing the arrival of another storm. Resisting panic, I calmly placed Rainy and Harley in lead. “All right.” The team promptly lurched forward.
Rounding the bend I scanned the horizon. Tom and Doc looked like tiny centipedes far ahead. Again, I battled panic. Please, PLEASE let me catch them. It took us an hour to close the gap. And when I finally approached the others, something strange was afoot. Neither of the teams was moving.
Drawing closer, I made out two sleds, two dog teams, and no mushers. Coasting to a stop, I jammed the hook down and trudged to the closest sled. Doc was on his back, lying on his sled bag. Snoring in the midafternoon sun.
Barry Lee was warned before he left Grayling, where he had refueled the team during a four-hour stop. “There’s decent trail for about ten miles, after that — nothing,” said the checker, who’d surveyed the river on a snowmachine earlier that morning.
“Well, I got the snowshoes, and I gotta go,” said Lee, feeling well rested and determined.
Two hours later, his confidence was ebbing. The trail ahead was swamped under two feet or more of loose snow. Lee strapped on his snowshoes. They were borrowed, of course, and he’d never tried them on. The homemade bindings were incorrectly attached. Each time he applied weight, the shoes nosed downward. Lee wore himself out trying to use them. After struggling for several hours, he returned to Grayling to regroup before trying again.
Daylight was going. Tom suggested we start looking for a sheltered camp. Doc wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted to reach Blackburn’s cabin, an unofficial rest cabin, which couldn’t be more than ten miles ahead.
We were out in the middle of the river when the sky rapidly darkened. Gusts of wind slapped at my sled bag. Cooley ordered his wolves toward a bluff that would offer some slight protection. Joining him, we all decided to wait this one out, using the delay to feed our dogs. With any luck, the evening squall would skip past before we were done.
It got colder, and the wind steadily increased. It was 14 below the first time Cooley checked his thermometer. When he checked again, minutes later, the reading was 20 below zero and falling. “Watch your ass,” he yelled.
Conditions felt deadly by the time I had water boiling in my cook pot. Standing with my back to the wind and my face shielded by the parka’s thick ruff, I carefully poured the hot water inside the cooler. Next, I lined the pans out. Then I sat on the cooler with my back to the wind, letting the food soak.
“Thirty below, boys,” Cooley shouted, chuckling.
Moving stiffly, I carried pans to the dogs, two at a time. The snow was soft, and I stumbled, splashing my gloves with the wet food. I felt my fingers burning, but it wasn’t from heat. In the brief time it took to fill a pan with steaming food and carry it to a dog, a skin of ice had formed across the surface of the pan. My wet fingertips burned from the extreme cold.
As soon as the dogs finished eating, I collected the empty pans so they wouldn’t lick them and freeze their tongues to the metal. Then I climbed inside the sled.
My hands were reduced to the functioning level of pincers as I pulled the sled-bag flap overhead. Yanking my gloves off with my teeth, I surveyed the damage. Seven fingertips were bloodless white. That was better than I had dared hope, nothing more than mild frostnip. Huddling, I breathed on my hands until they throbbed with renewed life. I shucked the parka and unpacked my sleeping bag. Sealing myself inside the cocoon, I ate another packet of salmon, chewed on a carton of frozen juice, then fell asleep, feeling confident about my hard-earned survival skills.
As he had been for 1,000 miles, Barve, the burly 45-year-old printer, remained in the hunt, leaving Elim Wednesday night. Not that you could tell anything in the blizzard. Visibility was limited to about ten feet when Lavon halted his team to search for markers on foot. His frightened dogs yanked the snow hook. When the musher returned, they were gone. He didn’t panic. He could find the damn dogs tomorrow. Survival came first, and it was goddamn cold. Lavon started walking toward Golovin.
On the other side of Elim, Garnie lost his team in similar circumstances, but his mitts were tied to the sled. Joe Garnie, an Inupiat from the coastal village of Teller, knew the enemy he faced. He dug himself a hole in the snow and flopped inside, facedown, conserving his body warmth as he waited for the storm to break. Whenever the creeping cold became unbearable, he ran in circles, waving his arms to get the blood pumping. Then he lay back down in his hole.
Garnie eventually made his way to a survival shelter, where he found snowmachiners tending a hypothermic Matt Desalernos.
On the ice between Shaktoolik and Koyuk, half a dozen mushers were lost for nearly 24 hours, including Barron’s 21-year-old son, Laird. Pinned down by the storm, mere yards from a shelter cabin he couldn’t see, the young musher’s bid for rookie-of-the-year collapsed. All he’d take home from this rite of passage was a partially frozen foot.
Terry Adkins’s bold ambitions perished out on the ice fronting Koyuk. He was reduced to huddling with fellow racer Gary Whittemore, who was shivering, badly hypothermic. Whittemore probably would have died without the Montanan’s help.
In Shaktoolik, two race volunteers shared the suffering, frostbiting their eyelids loading dropped dogs on a plane. In Nome, Thursday’s temperature was 20 below zero, with winds of 55 miles per hour.
Race marshal Kershner sounded beleaguered as he discussed the known injuries and reports of missing mushers. “I feel like a mother who’s trying to gather her chicks,” he told reporters.
Jeff Dixon fired up his snowmachine and left Shageluk on what he believed was a simple dog-food delivery mission. His duties kept expanding. First, he helped that fool from Anchorage, Rich Runyan, free his snowmachine from the drift. Next he found the Englishman with the starving dogs. Then Dixon had to go save Peele, whom he found sleeping on the ground outside his sled.
“You know those Iditarod people don’t care about you at all,” Dixon told Peele, shaking him awake. “They left you to die out here.”
Runyan didn’t spend long regrouping in Shageluk. He had ground to make up. At first light, he left for Anvik on his big snowmachine, towing the freight sled loaded with radio gear. Conditions worsened and, before long, Rich was lost again. Cruising atop a ridge, he glimpsed what appeared to be a marker in the valley below. Descending for closer inspection, he plowed into a deceptively large drift. He wrestled with it for a while, but it was no good. The snowmachine was stuck again.
Rich Runyan hadn’t eaten for hours. It was miserably cold, and hypothermia was becoming a definite threat. True, he still had that big radio, but he lacked the energy to assemble it. Unpacking his sleeping bag, the ham operator from Anchorage placed a call to the Lord.
Butcher’s dogs were reluctant to leave their cozy beds of straw. The air at White Mountain carried an angry scent that night. The calm when she arrived had given way to a heavy wind blowing snow across the trail. It didn’t bother Susan. She had an appointment to keep in Nome. At the precise minute her six-hour waiting period expired, 1:31 A.M., Thursday, March 14, she had her dogs on the march.
Iditarod’s defending champion got off to a rocky start. Before her team faded from view, spectators saw Butcher jump off her sled several times to lead her team back to the trail. Her husband, Dave Monson, wasn’t particularly concerned as he watched her exit. Dogs facing such a crush of media and fans had good reason to act skittish. His wife was still driving the best team in the race.
Minutes after the champ’s departure, a snowmachiner roared into the checkpoint.
“You can’t see anything out there,” he said.
The storm rolled in as Swenson packed to go. It was 30 below, snowing and blowing hard, as he mushed out of White Mountain, one hour, seven minutes behind Butcher. The final chase was underway.
Joe Runyan was the third musher out. Susan had the fastest team. Nobody could catch her. Joe accepted that, but he fully expected to catch Swenson. And he did, passing far to one side of Rick’s team, which had obviously strayed from the trail. That was understandable. Conditions were unbelievably bad. Runyan hoped the trail ahead was decently marked. His sled was stripped for a sprint to the finish line. He wasn’t packed for camping.
Peele collapsed on the floor of the Shageluk village school.
“What do you want to do?” asked a checker.
“I can’t leave, because I can’t get my hands to work,” the musher said, feeling morose.
Peele stalled through the day. He nursed his dogs, his aching body and spirit, hoping for a palatable solution where none existed. Forty-eight hours after limping into the village, the rookie from North Carolina signed the paperwork, adding his name to the scratch list, its numbers now having swelled to fourteen.
There was no uncertainty about Alan Garth’s status. From the moment the Englishman had accepted a ride on the snowmachine, leaving his dog team behind, he had become subject to disqualification. To his credit, Garth joined the village rescue party that left Shageluk Friday and saved those Redington dogs.
Swenson didn’t even see the other dog team. His leaders trotted straight through the string of sleepy, snow-covered sled dogs. He wasn’t aware of the other team, parked crosswise blocking the trail near Fish River Flats, until his sled was nearly upon them. Then he wondered if he was hallucinating. That was Slugo he saw resting there — one of Susan Butcher’s dogs.
A red suit with a dark fur collar popped out of the covered sled like a jack-in-the-box. It was Susan. Not sure what to make of this, Swenson shouted that he was continuing on. He got less than a mile before his headlamp gave out. Stripping off his gloves, the musher attempted to change the bulb, but had trouble seeing through his frosty eyelashes, and his hands instantly stiffened. His bare flesh couldn’t withstand the wind, which carried a chill factor of 90 below zero. Appalled and angry at this careless injury, Swenson jammed his frostnipped hands inside his snowpants to warm them.
Rick, helplessly stalled, saw another headlamp approaching from behind. It was Susan. She berated Swenson for leaving her without even checking to see whether she was all right. Butcher parked her team and helped Rick fix his headlamp. She explained that she had driven through here earlier trying to reach Timber, a sheltered area where the wind never blows, but that she’d turned back after losing the trail. The savage storm had engineered the unthinkable. Some 70 miles from Iditarod’s finish line, Rick and Susan, the sport’s celebrated rivals, agreed to stick together.
Swenson took the lead. The wind was so intense that he rode with his head turned to the left, protecting his face with the ruff. His leaders kept following the light to the side, and he repeatedly had to pull them back on the trail. Butcher was having the same troubles behind him. And then she was gone. No dogs. No headlamp. Swennie saw nothing behind him but swirling snow.
Cooley opened his eyes just in time. Daily’s figure was shrinking in the distance. The musher was on foot, his dogs apparently abandoned. Reflecting on his own misery, Doc was seized by the conviction that Tom — gripped by a suicidal impulse — was marching to his death. The veterinarian leaped from his sled.
Sheltered by the river bend, Daily hastily squatted in the snow and attended to what was, indeed, a personal emergency. He was pulling up his pants when Cooley rounded the corner.
“Tom, … I thought—” gasped Cooley, panting from his sprint. Then he noticed the steaming evidence of Daily’s vitality.
They both began to giggle.
Martin Buser was astonished. The shrewd Swiss musher had departed White Mountain at 5:30 A.M., holding scant hope of catching any of the four teams ahead. Yet, hard as it was to believe, here was Susan of all people, emerging from the blinding gale, returning toward the checkpoint.
“Hey, you’re going the wrong way, girl.”
“It’s not doable, Martin,” replied Butcher, mentioning that she feared for Swenson’s life. Lost as he was out there. “What are you going to do?”
“Well, I think I will give it a try,” said Buser.
Tim Osmar and Joe Runyan materialized from the storm next. Like the champ, both were returning to White Mountain. They urged Buser to give it up. To take shelter at the checkpoint until the weather broke.
Declining the invitations, Buser drove onward. He’d waited for this chance at redemption, at erasing the memory of the opportunity he had blown the year Redington faltered.
In the 1988 race, Buser’s young hounds had slowly but surely run down Smokin Joe’s team. They nipped at Redington’s heels all the way down the Yukon. The old musher’s dogs remained swift, but he was having increasing trouble staying awake. Redington gave it his best, retaking the lead several times between Ruby and Kaltag. But he wasn’t going to win.
The only one with a chance to stop Butcher that year was Martin Buser, an intense Swiss expatriate who was making his first appearance in the Iditarod’s front pack. Swenson was rooting for him, indeed, for anyone who could halt Butcher’s drive for three straight wins. He sent word that Martin should go ahead and use the lightweight racing sled he had waiting on the coast.
Leaving Shaktoolik, Buser actually led Butcher by nearly an hour. The sun was sinking, throwing rosy shadows across the ice. Photographer Rob Stapleton and I followed Butcher out of town on a snowmachine. She was all business in her red jump suit. Her team looked strong. Her lead dog, Granite, owned this section of the trail.
Then a ground blizzard swept across the front pack. Buser became disoriented and was lost for hours in the whiteout. When it lifted, Butcher held a commanding lead.
“I’ve gotten sleep all over the place,” she said, claiming the crown. “I don’t even feel like I’ve been in an Iditarod race.”
Looking haggard and disgusted, Swenson trailed her into Nome, saying that he “felt a little bad about beating Martin.” Buser finished a distant third, his face a windburned mask of regret.
In the three years since that disappointment, Buser hadn’t ever come close to duplicating that showing. Other mushers faulted his breeding program. Too much hound in those dogs, they said. The breed can’t handle coastal wind.
Watching Susan and the others retreating, Martin Buser reeled from the opportunity now before him. Far from being frightened, he heard a magnificent, enthralling, victory song riding this storm.
Back at White Mountain, Butcher described how she had marked Swenson’s last known location with an X in the snow, in case snowmachiners launched a search.
“If Rick’s got a leader with the will to get him through, more power to him,” she told a Times reporter. “I don’t think he had much hope when I last saw him.”
At the tail end of the field, Barry Lee made a deal. Two villagers in Grayling would bust a new trail to Eagle Island on their snowmachines, and he agreed to pay for their gas. The last musher in the field repacked for the Yukon with new determination. Next stop, Eagle Island.
Right off the bat, Lee noticed that his dogs looked feeble. The team’s confidence was shot from the recent turnabouts. It was a dispirited bunch that stumbled out of Grayling along the familiar river trail. Barry resorted to the easy two-hours on, two-hours off, schedule he had used during the first days of the race. This time it failed to perk up the dogs. The team’s progress remained dismal. Twelve hours of effort netted Lee barely 20 miles.
Less than an hour past our wretched Yukon camp, we found the cabin Doc had talked about the night before. The owners, David and Mona Blackburn, had amazing news.
“Have you heard? Swenson passed Butcher in a storm.”
After they became separated, Swenson apparently figured that Butcher had made use of the blinding conditions to pass him. That suspicion seemed confirmed since his leaders soon regained their confidence, acting as if they were chasing another team. The wind faded as Rick neared the cabin at Timber, where the snowfall reminded him of flakes in a Christmas ball. The 12-mile trip from White Mountain had taken three hours. Now the musher was presented with a mystery. Eight inches of fresh snow rested on the ground, and it was completely free of tracks. How could that be? Swenson wondered. Was Susan lost?
After a brief rest, Swenson continued. Emerging from the sheltering trees, the trail reentered the wind. There weren’t any markers to follow, and the team strayed into a willow patch. Swenson cautiously backtracked until he found a reflective marker. He was again on track, but the musher knew he had to be careful. Visibility was so bad he couldn’t even see his own feet. None of his lead dogs could be trusted here.
Clipping together a handful of spare neck lines, the musher attached himself to the front of the dog team. He was the leader now. Advancing from marker to marker, Swenson led his dogs onward. The wind remained blinding. The dogs repeatedly knocked him down, surging forward faster than he could walk. His driverless sled kept lurching into the team and causing tangles. Was this all worth it? the 40-year-old musher asked himself. Thoughts of his strained marriage and the years of humiliation provided him with his answer. Death on the Iditarod Trail would be better than giving in now, Rick Swenson vowed.
He was resting on the ridge, with his hood ruff flapping in the wind, when a bright light approached. He assumed it was Butcher and felt drained. But the light belonged to a snowmachiner.
“Where are the others?” Swenson asked the driver.
“They all turned back.”
Twenty-three hours after leaving White Mountain, a slow-moving musher, with his parka collar sealed up to his nose, stood by the Burl Arch in a glare of floodlights, stiffly waving to the crowd cheering his arrival at the Iditarod’s finish line at 1:35 A.M., March 15.
“I walked a long, long way leading the dogs,” said Swenson, his weary voice amplified through a public address system. “It was cold. It was not a pleasant night.” The musher’s energy returned as he discussed Butcher’s decision to turn back in the storm. “Maybe she’s gotten a little bit soft with four victories under her belt,” he said, prompting a whistling clamor on Front Street. The Iditarod’s all-time champ wasn’t finished. “She’s going to have to get SIX now — if she wants to be the top dog.”
The news of his victory staggered us. It wasn’t so much the idea that Rick had beaten Susan. It was the sheer notion that anyone was in Nome — while we had another 450 miles to go.
The Blackburns treated our shock with a heavy dose of bush hospitality. Picking up a fork to eat breakfast, I felt as if I was dining at a resort. The sausage was spicy and charred, just the way I like it. The orange juice was thick and painfully tart. It was hard to believe the Yukon was right outside waiting for us. It was a clear, starry night. The temperature on the Yukon registered 3 5 below as Barry Lee crawled into his sleeping bag. The situation was daunting, but he remained hopeful. Between the temperature and the prevailing calm, the trail ought to firm up by morning, and that might help a lot. A hard, fast trail would do wonders for his dogs’ spirits.
A shrieking wind awakened Barry three hours later. “Oh, my God,” the musher whispered, sticking his head out of the sled bag. It was blowing again. And it was warmer, much warmer out, maybe zero — a sure sign another storm was coming.
Lee got a rude surprise when he slipped on his bunny boots. The left toe was rock hard. A crack must have developed in the rubber vapor barrier. Moisture had seeped inside and frozen, destroying the borrowed boot’s insulation.
Lee headed his team up the trail. He had gone two or three miles before the tracks left by the snowmachiners disappeared in new drifts. The powder was as deep here as anything he’d seen. The situation was spinning out of control. Barry figured that Eagle Island was 35 miles farther. He had cooked every bit of food he had the night before, gambling that full bellies would carry his dogs the distance in a single hard march. That plan seemed wildly optimistic now. Conditions weren’t necessarily better on the trail behind him, where new drifts probably covered his path. Aware that a wrong decision here could prove fatal, Barry Lee turned to the one advisor who never failed him.
“God,” prayed the musher, “every other clue up the line has told me to go on. What’s going on here? Am I supposed to finish this race?”
Lee received an immediate response, a message sensed, rather than heard.
“No.”
The answer was so emphatic, Lee decided that his personal fears were talking. He asked again. “Am I supposed to finish this race?”
“NO.” He actually heard that. “YOU NEED TO GO HOME.”
Barry turned his leaders around for the last time. It was 25 miles back to the village, and every step became a battle. Lee was soaking wet and shivering. His foot was cold. His dogs rubbed hair off their hind legs plowing through the crusty drifts, but the musher kept driving them. He had no choice. He had no food to give them, and they were weakening by the hour.
Four miles out of Grayling, Barry Lee emptied everything but his sleeping bag out of the sled. He wanted to shave every spare ounce. It was going to be close, he knew, but the dogs would make it. He was now confident of that much.
Oddly enough, the musher drew some comfort from the day’s hardship. His unseen advisor was wise. This team never would have made it to Eagle Island. He had a season of mistakes to learn from. For now, retreat offered the only path toward salvation.
Doc’s wolf pack was faltering. After Blackburn’s cabin, the signs of stress were becoming unmistakable. Up and down his gang line Cooley’s dogs flopped on their backs, squirming in the snow with each pause. Their snarls and squabbling showed that the dogs weren’t fatigued in the physical sense. We weren’t traveling fast enough to tire his leased champions. But even the best lead dogs can only take so much pressure.
Daily shared the trail-breaking duties on this warm, sunny afternoon. But his old leader was slower than a glacier. It drove Doc crazy following the other team. He couldn’t take more than a mile of Tom’s creeping pace before impatiently reclaiming the lead, and then Cooley’s leaders would resume their games. At one point, Doc was trying to change his leaders in the deep snow when he tripped and fell, completely burying himself. The veterinarian popped back up, cursing, laughing, and almost crying as he spit out snow. My offer to put on snowshoes and blaze the trail myself didn’t help.
“Snowshoes? God no,” Cooley said, horrified. “We’ll be out here forever.”
In a deep section between two islands, we came across a half-buried bicycle. The powdery river had evidently defeated the specially rigged twin tires on each wheel. Judging from the tracks, the rider had continued on foot. We braced ourselves for the appearance of a body. Instead, we soon encountered an Athabaskan trapper traveling by snowmachine. Watching the winds the day before, the Indian from Grayling knew that any mushers left on the river had to be struggling. He’d come out scouting for us.
The trapper dug into his supplies, and, in short order, we three were sipping hot coffee and chewing strips of dried salmon. And the Indian had surprising news. A “whole bunch of teams” were still camping at Eagle Island, and the checkpoint lay little more than an hour away by dog team, he said.
I was famished and complimented the trapper on the salmon.
“You like them? Help yourself,” he said, handing me a baggy filled with the chewy strips.
Gunning his snowmachine, the trapper looped around and streaked back toward Eagle Island, repacking our new trail.
Swennie’s victory produced a weeklong orgy of front-page stories and special in-state broadcast reports. Elsewhere his victory was briefly noted, then the race swiftly faded from attention. The fate of the 50-odd teams left on the trail hardly rated a mention. Even in Alaska, most of the sports-page ink was devoted to baseball spring training, now entering its meaningless second week.
Four time zones away, television station WDCA played up Washington D.C.’s local Iditarod angle one last time. My participation in the race had already been the subject of several local television and newspaper reports. Now WDCA combined their interviews with my family with a home video of the start and a network story about Swenson’s victory. Assuming the Iditarod was over for everyone, the station erroneously reported that Washington’s musher had finished in sixtieth place.
As the newscast drew to a close, the anchors bantered about the incredible sequence of events that had placed me — the son of a once-prominent D.C. attorney — on a dog sled in Alaska.
“At least he’s not a lawyer,” anchor Jim Vance said.