Dusk was near as I parked in the Iditarod village taking root in the slough. “HOW LONG DO YOU PLAN TO STAY?” asked Eagle Island checker Ralph Conatser, a hard look in his eyes. Dogs were sleeping or stretching over long beds of straw. Smoke rose from several campfires. Heaps of supply sacks and trash were scattered in the crusty, urine-stained snow.
The stormy 60-mile trek up the Yukon had taken us more than 30 hours. Conatser tensed as I described our ordeal, mentioning that the dogs needed a good rest. He relaxed as I added, “So we won’t be pulling out until tomorrow morning.”
“Oh, that would be fine, just fine,” said the checker in a much warmer tone.
The scowl returned as Conatser gestured at the other dog teams scattered nearby. Terhune, Linda Plettner, Sepp Herrman, Don and Catherine Mormile had been camping on the island for the past three days. Mark Williams, Gunnar Johnson, and Urtha Lenthar had been in residence nearly that long. Friday’s addition of Doc, Daily, and me brought to eleven the total number of dog teams crowding Conatser’s peaceful retreat. He and his wife even had a visiting cyclist. After intercepting the three of us, the trapper had found Bob, the owner of the abandoned bicycle, struggling up the river on foot, through waist-deep powder. The amused trapper had given the failed Idita-cycler a lift to the checkpoint.
The crowd itself wasn’t unusual. Twice that many Iditarod teams had jammed into the slough after Runyan lead the first wave last Sunday. But hardly seven hours had passed before King launched most of those teams on a new stampede up the Yukon. Mushers traveling in the rear of the field were different, said Conatser. They weren’t racers. They were campers. Look at those wood fires burning in his slough! These damn campers would clear-cut his entire island if he didn’t watch out.
“Some of these people act like they’re never going to leave. They’re eating us out of house and home. And we got one woman here who’s driving me crazy.”
“Daily and I have been chasing these guys for weeks,” I said. “Don’t worry. Now that we’ve caught up, we won’t be sticking around.”
The checker invited us to come by his cabin after we finished with the dogs. “Haven’t got much left, but my wife will fix you something. I’m glad somebody here remembers the Iditarod is a race.”
Jon Terhune hadn’t forgotten. As Daily, Doc, and I arrived, the irritable Soldotna musher was tightening the straps, resealing his sled bag. Stuck in this lousy slough since Wednesday, Terhune was anxious to escape. He was sick of listening to Linda Plettner, sick of that Gunnar kid, the Mormiles, and those others. He thought they were a bunch of sorry whiners, every one of them. He planned to ditch them once and for all.
Earlier that afternoon, Terhune and the other seven mushers encamped at Eagle Island had pitched in $50 apiece and hired the trapper to break a new trail to Kaltag. They were unaware that Niggemyer, the race manager, had already cut a deal with the trapper, filling his snowmachine with gas for that same mission. The trapper kept a straight face as the mushers approached him with their request. They wanted him to wait until morning, but the trapper was impatient to get back to Grayling. The trip north was hundreds of miles out of the way. So the trapper struck out for Kaltag that evening, carrying his unexpected $400 bonus.
Another cold night was forecast on the river, at least 30 below. Plettner and the others resolved to wait until daylight, giving the trail more time to set. Terhune thought they were fools.
“Screw you people,” he said, stomping out of the stove-heated mushers’ quarters. “I’m leaving.”
Plettner, Herrman, and the Mormiles felt differently. They were angered at Conatser’s refusal to share supplies abandoned by previous teams, and his stinginess in doling out alcohol for their stoves. Several went so far as to accuse the checker of creating the shortage by bartering away his checkpoint reserves. They had complained to Iditarod as a group.
Before we arrived, Bill Chisholm had flown in to Eagle Island to sort out the dispute. The race judge had marching orders from Kershner to get the trailing pack teams moving. Accordingly, Chisholm not only backed up Conatser’s decisions on supplies; he warned the mushers not to expect special help. The visit ended in a confrontation between Herrman and Chisholm, a neighbor of Swennie’s who was familiar with the German’s hard-ass reputation as a dog trainer and Brooks Range survivalist.
“Sepp,” the race judge said, “I bet you never see the coast.”
The comment infuriated Herrman, whose pride was already suffering from mistakes he had made early in the race. True, he hadn’t pushed his dogs. He’d been playing nursemaid ever since the starting line. But Sepp no longer doubted that he’d make it to Nome, if only to spit in the judge’s face.
There were hard feelings all the way around. I wasn’t about to take sides. Herrman and the other mushers were foolish to ask for official help. I’d seen that lesson played out many times.
“From the moment Swenson crossed under that arch, we’ve been on borrowed time,” I warned the group. “Iditarod is going to want to wrap up the race — any way they can. If we want to get to Nome, we have to take care of ourselves. Ask for food, fuel, anything — and you’re risking disqualification. I’ve seen it happen.”
The others seemed surprised. They weren’t considering the logistics supporting our extended adventure. This was day 14. More than a dozen mushers were already in Nome celebrating with Swenson. The support network of veterinarians, pilots, ham-radio operators, and other volunteers was already fragmenting. The majority of these volunteers came from Anchorage or other urban areas. The thrill of providing us with 24-hour service, sleeping on hard floors, and eating camp meals was, by now, wearing thin. The big award banquet in Nome, due to start at about six on Sunday evening, marked the end of the race for most people involved.
Even so, our situation looked pretty good to me. We had Doc Cooley, our own private veterinarian. We could expect help from Iditarod supporters in the villages ahead, where our supplies were still waiting. Most important, within the group here we had the sheer dog power needed to break our own trail to Nome. Strength in numbers was something Daily, Doc, and I keenly appreciated after our hard-fought drive from Grayling.
“I can’t BELIEVE they’re waiting for us,” Daily confided later, echoing my own thoughts. “But it sure is nice.”
The Yukon swallowed the trail before his eyes. Terhune was discouraged, but refused to backtrack. Every mile brought him closer to Nome and farther away from those slackers in the slough.
Grueling hours later, the musher saw a light approaching. It was weaving like crazy, left and right, left and right. As it drew closer, the light straightened out, taking a direct line toward him. It was the trapper on his snowmachine. The man had lost the trail on the return trip from Kaltag. He was searching for it when he spotted Terhune’s headlamp.
“You’re the only one that came?” shouted the trapper, doubting the evidence of his own eyes.
Terhune shrugged.
The trapper’s freight sled was loaded with extra cases of Heet alcohol fuel, which he was delivering to the checkpoint back at Eagle Island. He unpacked a handful of bottles and gave them to Terhune. The trail was open, the villager said, but he didn’t think it would last. “Try and avoid the places where it goes back and forth,” he added, “because I’ve been lost for an hour.”
In the middle of the night, the trapper threw open the door to our warm room on Eagle Island and staggered inside. Clutching an open bottle of liquor, he stumbled over the mushers slumbering in his path.
“What’re you all doing here?” he shouted, quite drunk. “Put inna trail alla way to Kaltag. You shoulda gone. Shoulda gone.”
At the river’s edge, the trail disappeared — no other word fit. Rainy cast about, perplexed. I ran to the front of the team and calmed her, searching for clues in the hard white crust. Nine dog teams had come this way in the last hour or so — channeled along the river through about eight winding miles of waist-high brush. Not a sign of the traffic remained. Wind whipping across the exposed flats had erased every scratch, every pawprint of their passage.
A churning white cloud swallowed the river ahead. It was a ground blizzard, a surface-hugging soup of wind-whipped powder. My team was perched on the edge of a gray-white limbo, violent and surreal. Our vantage point on the brink offered no refuge, nor did the scrubby bushes behind us. We were horribly exposed to the wind raking the frozen river. The dogs didn’t like the looks of this. If I wanted to avoid a forced camp, we had to keep moving.
I took Rainy and Harley by the neck line, preparing to lead them by foot, when Daily’s frightened voice cut through the storm.
“Wait, wait,” he cried, halting his dogs behind mine. “My hand is frozen!”
Fresh out of the checkpoint, Tom had noticed his hands felt cold in those high-tech gloves. Stripping off the outer shells, he inserted a chemical hand warmer into each mitt. That effort was undermined by spindrift powder, which instantly collected on his thin polypropylene inner liners. With the shells back on, the snow melted, and Daily’s hands became soaked, and his fingers became even colder. He forced the discomfort from his mind, waiting for the little chemical packs to kick in. That stoicism proved misguided; one of the warmers was a dud.
Coming up behind me, Daily rudely discovered that he couldn’t even flex the fingers on his chilled hand.
My dogs were lying down in the wind. Not understanding his predicament, I angrily urged him to hurry.
“Give me five minutes.”
“Make that two minutes,” I snapped. “Tom, we gotta go!”
I ran back and helped Daily swap his wet liner for a dry one, slipping another warmer in the mitt. As the two of us fumbled, the dogs on both teams began digging in, instinctively carving shelters from the drifts.
“I think we should consider turning around,” said Tom, flexing his stiff hand inside a mitt, uncertain whether it was damaged.
“We are NOT going back!” I declared, angry that he would even suggest such a thing. “We’re two hours out — that’s two hours closer to Nome.”
If I had to weather another storm, I wanted to do it right there, without surrendering an inch. The situation was infuriating. After all the trouble we had gone through to catch those other teams, here Tom and I were in last place again, falling farther behind by the minute. And why? Patching harnesses might have cost me a few minutes, but that wasn’t the main reason. It was because we sat on our asses and let the others get away — that’s why! I’d be damned before I’d turn around.
Sensible as ever, Daily was equally adamant. This was a terrible place to stop. Dogs couldn’t rest here. There was no way to feed them. What if the storm didn’t break for hours? Or days? We risked weakening our dogs through exposure. It made more sense, he felt, to regroup in the shelter of the slough. He didn’t mention his concerns about the hand; it stung, at least that was a good sign.
The two of us were going at it when Cooley unexpectedly mushed up from behind. The dog-driving veterinarian had been detained at the Conatsers’ cabin, where he had used the couple’s radio phone to confer with Iditarod headquarters.
“Why’d you stop?”
We hurriedly explained the situation.
Doc shook his head. “I don’t do reverse!” he shouted, grinning through frosty whiskers.
With a sharp command, Cooley ordered the wolf pack on by, passing our already snow-covered dogs. Showing nary a trace of hesitation, his team marched into the shrieking void. Daily, whose hand was now wonderfully pliable, and I quickly roused our dogs and chased him.
Terhune followed windbent trail markers into a narrow slough. Something about the shape of the drifts here made him edgy. The snow was a bit too wavy, too sculpted. He didn’t care to imagine the sort of wind conditions required to create this special effect.
Jon was aware that his dogs were nearing their limit. What about that deserted fish camp not too far back? The old buildings weren’t much to look at, but they offered some shelter from the wind. He grabbed his leaders and turned the team around.
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 the 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.
There were two shelter cabins on the 90-mile trail to Unalakleet. Before we left Kaltag, some members of the group were talking about stopping at the first cabin, a trip of about 30 miles. Herrman made the stop after pushing through the storm. That made sense for him. I took it for granted that last night’s hillside debacle had canceled such plans for the rest of us. My team certainly wasn’t ready for another break midmorning Monday. We’d only driven 15 miles!
Outside the cabin nine dog teams were parked, end to end, blocking the trail for several hundred yards. The trail ahead was wide open, if I could get to it. In an absolute rage, I stomped to the cabin, threw open the door, and began screaming. Everyone looked at me like I was crazy. Herrman had coffee brewing. Most of the drivers were making a short breakfast stop. Only Urtha, Catherine Mormile, and a few others planned longer breaks. I remained incensed, demanding the immediate removal of those trail-blocking teams. And, from here on, I swore I’d file official complaints against anyone I caught snacking dogs on the trail in front of Harley.
A few mushers reparked their teams, off the trail, near the cabin. Most ended their break and cleared out. As the trail ahead of us cleared, Harley and Rainy threaded their way through the traffic jam. Watching the others depart, Catherine changed her mind about staying and hurried to get ready. Her team was still blocking the trail as mine approached.
“You go ahead,” she said.
As I guided my leaders around her team, Mormile suddenly pulled her snow hook and tried to outrun us, nearly causing a tangle.
“My team is faster than yours. I’m supposed to be ahead of you,” she snapped.
Both of us urged our teams forward, meanwhile cussing each other out. The argument was finally settled by the dogs — mine emerging in front.
So she was faster? Only in her dreams. Driving hard, I left her behind. Later, during a quick break, I described the scene to Terhune. He laughed for the first time in days. Mormile didn’t catch up until we were camping that evening at Old Woman Cabin.
The plywood cabin was sparsely furnished with a pair of bunks and a fat stove. After tending dogs, mushers filtered inside. The tensions of the morning were gone, and everyone was in a sharing mood. Lenthar gave me a roll of film. I joined the mushers providing Herrman’s dogs with extra food, giving the light-traveling trapper a big chunk of lamb.
My own acute shortage was in personal food. When I had shipped out supplies, I hadn’t planned on two-and three-day treks between checkpoints. I hadn’t sent out enough juice or snacks. My main-course menu was not only insufficient; it was sabotaged by flawed packaging. Two of my staples, Anna’s meat-loaf, as well as her potatoes, were sealed in plastic baggies which disintegrated in hot water. I had to chuck them, or nibble on icy half-thawed portions, another sorry testimony to the importance of prerace field-testing. I had more success with the precooked steaks and pork chops. Each was individually wrapped in tin foil. To heat one up, I merely set the wrapped foil on a hot wood stove. By Kaltag, I was developing a reputation as a carnivore.
My provisions had seemed extravagant when Mary Beth and Anna spread them all out in the newspaper’s lunchroom. Yet I was running on empty at Old Woman Cabin. More was waiting in the supply sacks at Unalakleet, but here I was down to raiding the shelter’s emergency stocks: peanut butter, stale crackers, and a pile of dried salmon scraps someone found in a corner of the room. Daily, likewise destitute, joined me in delving into the meager rations.
Trading stories by the stove late Monday night, I dug out the surviving bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Plettner, Cooley, Herrman, and I toasted our impending arrival on the coast.
The Nome banquet had been delayed. Too many teams remained out in the storms pounding the coast. The postrace party was finally held Monday, March 18, day 17 of the race. While Daily and I gobbled stale crackers and scrutinized withered fish scraps, searching for edible chunks of salmon, 26 mushers and some 850 fans were moving through a buffet line at the Nome armory.
Accepting a $32,000 check for third place, Susan Butcher, her face puffy from windburn, graciously praised Swenson’s unprecedented achievement — restaking his claim as Iditarod’s all-time champ.
Martin Buser’s three-year-old son, Nikolai, sang impromptu trail songs into the microphone as his heavily scabbing father collected a check for $39,500 for his second place finish. It wasn’t the prize Martin had hoped to gain that final night. Hearing from a snowmachiner that Swenson was reported missing, Buser had slipped on a white windbreaker, what he liked to call his “stealth shell,” and sought to steal the lead. But Swenson, taking nothing for granted, had arranged to delay reports of his arrival at Safety, the final checkpoint before Nome.
As he presented Rick Swenson with a silver cup and the first-place prize of $50,000, Nome’s perennial checker, Leo Rasmussen, recalled the musher’s first appearance on stage as an Iditarod winner. The year was 1977, and the grand prize stood at $9,600, which, even then, hardly covered the expense of fielding a competitive team.
“He was so enamored with the race he couldn’t stop talking. He must have talked for 24 hours to whoever would listen,” Rasmussen said.
Swenson’s Goose and Major were voted joint custody of the Golden Harness Award given to Iditarod’s best lead dog.
Mere blocks from the finish-line arch, Nome musher Matt Desalarnos had the $14,000 check for seventh place in his grasp. Alas, his dogs veered toward an alley, and Dee Dee Jonrowe passed him. That last-minute move from seventh to eighth place cost him $1,000. Chief vet Morris also presented Dee Dee with the Humanitarian Award for displaying the best dog care among the competitive drivers.
Barve had regrouped after finding his lost dogs and finished seventeenth, winning $6,000. Garnie had also recovered his lost team and continued, but he missed out on the money, finishing twenty-third. The respect for their achievement, surviving storms on foot, was evident as the mushers in Nome awarded the pair jointly the Iditarod’s “Most Inspirational Musher Award.” The wind-scorched Eskimo had extra incentive pushing him toward the finish line; Garnie had to finish the race or forfeit the new pickup he had won in Skwentna.
The scars of the race were most evident on Adkins, whose windburned face was a swollen mass of scabs as he stepped forward to collect his $5,000, nineteenth-place check. The Montanan was also presented with the Sportsmanship Award for rescuing Whittemore on the ice outside Koyuk. Several dogs had died during the storm, and both men had been hypothermic and frostbitten by the time they reached the village. The worst part of the experience, Adkins told the crowd at the banquet, was when village medics had stuck a rectal thermometer up his ass.
“That was probably the most embarrassed I’ve ever been on the Iditarod,” he said.
Five more teams mushed into Nome before the banquet broke up. The last in was Redington. He checked in under the arch just before midnight, in thirty-first place. Cheers resounded through the armory hall at the announcement of Old Joe’s arrival.
The custody of one more award remained unsettled as the main banquet ended. Its ownership floated among a select few of the 29 mushers left on the trail. It wasn’t something anyone particularly wanted. Call it a booby prize. Such is the status of the Iditarod’s Red Lantern.
A sudden cry shattered the peace within Old Woman Cabin. Asleep on the floor, I awakened to find Sepp Herrman standing in the center of the room. The disheveled German was hurriedly collecting his gear.
“I’ve got to sleep outside,” the trapper mumbled, tightening the laces on his mukluks. “Where I live, I hardly hear nobody. I can’t take a house of snoring men.”