Leaving the campsite at Finger Lake, I mushed into an inky void. The Northern Lights had faded, and clouds must have rolled in, because there wasn’t a single star shining. Despite new batteries, my headlamp merely poked at the darkness with its narrow, ineffectual beam. Maybe my eyes were shot from staring at the bonfire, but the night was blacker than black. So it was that I had a blind man’s grip on the sled — when my dogs plunged over the edge of an invisible chasm.
Worst hill I’d ever run with a dog team. Couldn’t see the bottom. Fresh from their rest, the dogs sprinted down the slope, while I teetered on one slippery runner, stabbing for the brake with my free foot. As unexpectedly as it began, the blind fall ended. The void leveled out, and I continued onward, feeling my terror give way to anger. Someone at the damn checkpoint could have mentioned the killer hill less than a mile ahead. Guess they didn’t want to spoil my fun.
The torture of the unexpected was becoming a familiar theme. Entering the race, I thought my reporting background would more than compensate for my mushing inexperience. I could list Iditarod’s famous hazards: Rainy Pass, the descent into Dalzell Gorge, and the brutal Farewell Burn. I had a general idea of the geography from flying the route, something few other rookies could claim. But aerial observations made at 100 miles an hour were meaningless here on the ground. And writing secondhand stories was no substitute for real life.
Uncertainties were in full swing early Tuesday morning, as I approached the infamous canyon at Happy River Valley.
“Happy River’s got less than half the usual snow,” race manager Jack Niggemyer had warned us at the prerace musher’s meeting. “The steps are in pretty good shape, but they’re narrower than usual. Just be cautious. It’s not a death ride, but it won’t be as easy as last year.”
Barry Lee had heard that he should unfasten the tug lines before attempting the steps, so the dogs couldn’t pull quite as hard on the downhill chutes. He had shared the tip while we camped at Finger Lake. It sounded like a good idea, but I had a feeling — mushing through tonight’s void — that I wouldn’t know I was close to Happy River until the team dragged me over the edge. So I ran all night with the tugs disconnected and a tight grip of my handlebar, expecting to whip into another dark hole any second.
Light was breaking through the trees when I saw a handmade sign nailed to a tree. “SLOW!” it proclaimed, over a sketch of a dog team running down a 75-degree slope. “Hill next four steps.”
If only I’d known the canyon was marked with a traffic hazard sign.
Terhune took the plummet the afternoon before my own descent. The three steep drops, cut sideways into the canyon, were tricky, but he managed to steady himself, sliding on one heel, while holding his sled tilted toward the wall, as veterans had warned him to do. Indeed, Terhune wasn’t finding the canyon all that scary, and he relaxed as the team leveled out on what he assumed was the canyon floor. But this year Iditarod’s trailbreakers had tried to ease the descent into Happy River Valley with not three, but four sideways steps down the wall. The final switchback took the musher by complete surprise.
Terhune hung on as his sled tumbled down the side of the canyon, dragging the half-dozen dogs in the rear of his team. The sled rolled six times before slamming to a stop against small trees and bushes. Several dogs were pinned underneath. Terhune was scared to look.
A television crew from ABC’s Wide World of Sports was strategically positioned at the bottom of the canyon. The cameraman recorded Terhune’s mishap, then rushed over to get a close-up of the musher’s reaction.
Jon was sprawled on his back when the cameraman leaned over him.
“How would you like that thing shoved up your ass,” cried the infuriated former paratrooper as he jumped to his feet.
The cameraman hastily retreated. Footage of the spill showed up in the network’s Iditarod broadcast, minus Terhune’s commentary.
The dogs were unscathed. Their master was the one hobbling out of the canyon. Terhune had twisted his back. His fingers began tingling and soon became numb. Before long, the gentlest of bumps sent pain shooting through his spine.
Climbing a steep, bare riverbank on the far side of the canyon, Terhune’s sled became stuck. The crippled musher lacked the strength to free it. He wasted 30 minutes extending his gang line, hoping to improve the leverage of the dogs. But the sled remained wedged. He was struggling with the problem when the Hot Dog Man arrived on the scene. Munoz helped Terhune muscle the sled up the hill, and the pair mushed together into the Rainy Pass checkpoint late Monday afternoon.
Spreading straw for the dogs, Terhune lay down in his sleeping bag next to his leaders. He placed his windup clock under his ear, with the alarm set for three hours. He figured the clock was broken when he awakened eight hours later, but there was nothing wrong. Bells had sounded until the spring ran down; Terhune had just never heard them.
Dozens of teams had wiped out on the steps before I ventured into Happy River Valley. Their mishaps cut grooves in the snow, turning the short, steep drops into suicide chutes. My sled launched into the canyon on three of the four descents. Twice I stayed aboard and, leaning toward the wall, managed to keep my sled from rolling as it skidded downward, coming to rest against bushes and trees rooted on the side of the canyon. A few dogs were dragged over the edge with me, but most dug in, holding firm as they waited for new orders from the boss.
“All right! All right. Go ahead!” My sled weighed at least 300 pounds. The total load had to be closer to 500 pounds with me added. Displaying the formidable power of 15 dogs, the team easily hauled sled and driver back on track.
I thought my sled-handling was improving when I made it down the third step unscathed. Right. My sled went completely airborne on the fourth, and I let go. For the first time ever, I consciously let go of a dog team. The sled landed in a bushy tree about 15 feet down the canyon wall. The dogs in the front of the team crouched low, hugging the slope. Down below, Cyrus looked around frantically, acting more bewildered than hurt. His partner in wheel, Skidders, was already on his feet, calmly shaking himself off. Feeling guilty, I clambered down to retrieve my sled.
“I wouldn’t do the dogs any good with a broken leg,” I told myself, but the words sounded false.
“Denali” is an Athabaskan word meaning “great one,” or “high one.” Local Indians gave the peak towering over the Interior that honored title long before 1896, when prospector William Dickey stuck the name McKinley on North America’s tallest mountain. The traditional name is preferred by most Alaskans over Dickey’s tribute to an Ohio politician who never set foot in Alaska. Indeed, just about every musher has a big dog named Denali, and I was no different.
Wide-shouldered with peaked ears, weighing about 45 pounds, my Denali was muscled like a canine bodybuilder. The young male, a month shy of three years old, should have been coming into his prime on the Iditarod Trail. He and his litter-mate, Screech, shared a striking physical resemblance. But that was all they had in common. Whereas she was a hard-working sweetheart, he was surly and constantly growled at the other males. And he wasn’t keen on putting those rippling muscles to work. His tug line drooped whenever I looked away.
Maybe the others were fed up with Denali’s laziness. Mushers talk about veteran dogs nipping young slackers in the ass. Perhaps the young male made a move for dominance within the team and was rebuffed. I heard a quick growl, then the other dogs turned on Denali as a group, fangs bared, and began tearing into him from every side. I’ve seen big males square off, but the curl in tiny Cricket’s lips as she sunk her teeth into Denali’s left haunch was more menacing. There was no mistaking her intent, or that of the other assailants. It was a pack judgment.
I jumped into the fray as Harley circled back to get in on the action. Throwing myself over Denali as a shield, I elbowed and kicked his attackers away. Then I unclipped the victim from the team and tied him behind the sled.
Blood oozed from bites on his nose and ears, but Denali didn’t appear seriously harmed. I was debating what to do with him when I saw Raven nervously watching from the woods nearby. The sight gave me a chill. Lose a dog and I’d be out of the race. At home, I wouldn’t have worried, since our escapees never strayed far. But I couldn’t take anything for granted with a spooked dog in strange surroundings.
“Here Raven. C’mon little princess,” I said, gently coaxing her. The tone of my voice was all she needed. She dashed over with her tail between her legs, trembling, shaken by the violence.
“That’s OK Raven,” I said, stroking my delicate black beauty. “Everything’s all right.”
I placed Denali in wheel, where I could keep him under closer watch. If there were lingering animosities, they were soon forgotten. The dogs, including Denali, perked up their ears and leaped to their feet at the familiar rustling sound of the snack bag.
The trail to Rainy Pass rolled and snaked through a forest of thin alders. When they set trail earlier in the winter, Iditarod volunteers had trimmed these fast-growing trees. Unfortunately, the snow pack dropped during a warm spell that followed, subjecting dog teams to a gauntlet of jagged sticks and stumps projecting eight inches or more from ground level.
Plowing through mile after mile of the battering sticks, I kept wondering if we were on the right trail. But the markers were unmistakable. My sled was taking a beating. Sticks kept snagging the chains connecting a piece of snowmachine track between my runners, which I used as an extra brake. Sometimes the impediments stopped the team, throwing me against the handlebar — but only for an instant, until the stick, or whatever it was, gave way under pressure, launching my sled forward as if from a slingshot. On one sharp dip, I tasted utter disaster as a stump snagged my sled bow. Under pressure from the dogs, my sled bent in what seemed to be an impossibly tight arc. I braced myself, dreading the “crack” of runners snapping. Thankfully, the bow clamps burst first. My sled popped loose, sporting a busted nose, but sliding.
I almost never drink hard liquor, but I had left Knik packing two bottles of Jack Daniel’s. It was Jack Studer’s idea. The larger quart-sized bottle of whiskey was strictly for trading purposes. Out in the villages, a bottle can buy you a freshly laid snowmachine trail, said Studer, who understood better than anyone the misery of plodding to Nome on snowshoes.
I was also carrying a pint of Jack for personal use. Studer advised me to take a quick belt as I approached each checkpoint. He said it would soothe my transition from the serenity of the trail to the madhouse atmosphere of checkpoints.
The seal on that pint of Jack remained unbroken through Eagle River, Wasilla, Knik, Skwentna, and Finger Lake. But I was ready for a sip as I neared Rainy Pass late Tuesday morning. The bottle felt light as I pulled it out. Hardly a drop remained inside. At first I was baffled, but then I noticed a tiny hole in the cap, where the booze had leaked out. A broken bottle I could understand — but what were the odds of this happening?
Groping inside the sled bag to see if there were any other surprises, I pulled out a handful of plastic splinters: the remains of my spare headlamp reflector. That was no biggie. Though headlamp bulbs burned out fairly often, I had never, over the entire course of training, cracked a headlamp reflector. Those things were as tough as steel.
Parking on a gentle snow-covered slope below Rainy Pass Lodge, I felt bruised and disoriented. Like a mugging victim, assaulted in a beautiful park. My hips and knees were sore from being dragged God knows how many times. Raising my right arm was extremely painful. It humbled me to think that Redington was mushing this trail in his seventies.
And what about Colonel Vaughan? He was already 70 years old in 1975, the first time he attempted Redington’s Great Race. He didn’t make it to Nome that year. Or the year after, when he took a wrong turn in the Alaska Range and spent four days lost before being rescued. Friends and race officials tried to discourage the colonel from attempting the Iditarod again. Vaughan didn’t listen. He returned for the 1978 race, and that time he made it to Nome. Over the next 11 years, the colonel ran the Iditarod eight more times, notching his fourth official finish in the 1990 race at the ever-ready age of 84.
The first time I met him, Vaughan was stretched out on the ice at a checkpoint, crawling from dog to dog, inspecting each paw, rubbing in ointment and placing on booties. He used the belly-down approach to compensate for his bad knees. The colonel wasn’t about to let a slight physical disability force him into retirement. Not Norman Vaughan, the only U.S. airman to earn battlefield honors by dog team, by retrieving a top secret instrument from a downed plane in Greenland during World War II. Sixty years after dropping out of Harvard to handle dogs on Admiral Robert Byrd’s expedition to the South Pole, Vaughan was Alaska’s ageless adventurer.
Contemplating my bruised thirty-five-year-old body, I knew the colonel was tougher than I’d ever be.
I was strongly inclined to take my 24-hour layover at Rainy Pass, a scenic horse ranch overlooking a lake high in the Alaska Range. But the lodge was closed to mushers this year, and the checker wasn’t encouraging.
“This really isn’t a good place to stay,” he said. “There are no facilities. Not even a tent. Yesterday it snowed and rained on the mushers.”
It was day 4 of the race. I’d slept a total of about six hours since leaving Anchorage, and I wasn’t thinking clearly. I badly needed a nap. Climbing a mountain pass in this foggy state sounded crazy. Yet I couldn’t rest. There was talk of a storm on its way. I didn’t want to get caught on the wrong side of the range. Rainy Pass might stay blocked for days, and my race would be over right here.
I packed and repacked, agonizing over whether to move on. Medred came over to interview me. It was so bright out that I had to squint to bring the reporter into focus. Finding his questions difficult to follow, I answered with grunts.
Ace was camped nearby. The veteran said he was going to try to beat the storm over the pass. That sealed my decision. We agreed to rest our dogs a few hours, then pull out about 6 P.M.
Mushing the Iditarod Trail, it was tempting to think that the dogs and I had cut all ties to our lives back in town. But the mundane world hadn’t forgotten me. A personal check for $145, written in payment for Dr. Leach’s veterinary services, arrived Tuesday at National Bank of Alaska. Last-minute supplies and unexpected expenses, like the vet bill from Rat’s fight with Daphne, had pushed the total cost of my participation in the Iditarod over $16,000. My personal account was already overdrawn by $3.56. All my bank accounts, including the special Iditarod account, were tapped out. The check written to Dr. Leach was returned unpaid. An overdraft notice was mailed to Deadline Dog Farm.
Ace came over to talk while I was getting ready to break camp.
“I don’t want to scare you,” he said, stroking his thick beard, “but take a little extra food, a little extra fuel, and prepare yourself in case we don’t make it.”
Ace spoke from experience. His first race he had weathered a long night in the pass, trapped mere yards from a shelter tent that had been rendered invisible by the storm.
I had 15 dogs, which meant that I had 60 paws to prepare. The situation was not helped when Rat and Cyrus pulled their booties off. Ace mushed out of the checkpoint. It took me an additional 45 minutes to get ready. Several veterinarians came over and helped guide my team out of the checkpoint. The dogs looked good, including Denali, who had been treated for his bites. I sensed that the vets were more concerned about my own haggard condition and blatant incompetence.
Despite the rumored storm, it was bright out, with hardly a cloud in the sky and a calm, warm 20 above zero. Trail markers led us to a steep hill, perhaps 150 feet high. Rainy and Harley tried to climb it, but slipped right back down. Bathed by the evening sun, the snow was too slick for their new booties.
Damned if I was going to strip off those booties. Not after the hassle of putting them on. I ran up front, grabbed my leaders by the neck line, and began pulling them up the slope, kicking steps in the soft snow with my bunny boots. The dogs seemed amused to see the boss working on the front end of the gang line. Together we crept up the slippery hill.
Looking virtually straight down at my 64-foot-long string of dogs, I wondered what the hell was going to happen if the sled tipped, or I lost my footing. But the sled remained upright, incredibly enough. One step at a time, the team and I neared the top.
Lavrakas spotted us climbing the hill. It reminded him of a scene from the gold-rush days: a miner making a superhuman effort as he hauled supplies toward an unknown camp. The incline was so steep, however, that the photographer rather doubted I was on the right trail.
The light was starting to go. Lavrakas roared to the bottom on his snowmachine. Alas, he was digging in his camera bag for the right lens when I crested the top of the hill.
I mushed toward the pass with growing dread. The landscape was barren, completely inhospitable. The surrounding mountains were jagged and cruel, casting an ominous air over the basin I was ascending. As dusk settled in, I caught Ace crossing a windswept plain. He was having trouble with his leaders and waved me ahead.
It grew darker and the wind picked up. Snow began falling. The trail was rising with no end in sight. I sensed that we’d lost our race with the storm, but there was no turning back.
Seeking a spiritual boost, I popped a tape in my Walkman. The band was Los Lobos. I enjoyed the tune until I actually listened to the words: “There’s a deep dark hole, and it leads to nowhere….”
Lavrakas reappeared on his snowmachine, shadowing my team. Several times he speeded ahead and positioned himself to get pictures of my dogs bursting through the flowing snow. His flashes added a surreal dimension to my predicament.
I was warm enough, but the wind and snow were definitely getting worse. And I was mushing up into Rainy Pass, elevation 3,400, the highest point on the 1,150-mile Iditarod Trail. Redington once faced 100-below-zero conditions on this same stretch. I was thinking about that. And I was thinking about the warning from Ace.
When I got the chance, I flagged down Lavrakas and asked him if he knew how far it was to the survival shelter. He raced back to confer with Ace, then zoomed ahead, vanishing in the storm. About 30 minutes later, the photographer returned.
“I went quite a ways ahead and couldn’t find the shelter,” Jim said, looking grim.
I was reluctant to part from my speedy messenger in the storm. Lavrakas’s face had taken on a guardian angel’s glow. I think we both suspected I wasn’t ready for this. But my dogs were straining to go. And the trail wasn’t getting any better.
“I’m strapped to an engine with no reverse,” I shouted over the snowmachine’s throb. “Tell Ace I’m going ahead.”
The shelter was supposed to be on the edge of a lake, near the top of the pass. In the tunnel vision created by my headlamp, I was lucky to glimpse the dogs, much less the landscape. Visibility was so poor, we could be within ten feet of the shelter and I might not see it. New snow was already piled a foot deep, and it was coming down hard.
Rainy was in her element, acting strangely buoyant. She and Harley were leaping, leaping into the swirling soup, splashing through the flowing drifts. I was so tired I could hardly stand. The snowflakes streaking toward my goggles reminded me of the way stars appear when the starship Enterprise shifts into warp drive. Were we moving uphill or was it down? Did the trail really tilt sideways here? I felt so disoriented, I couldn’t tell.
Rainy seemed to know where she was going.
“Have you been here before little Rainy? Is this where you got your name?”
Our records about the lesbian’s racing history were inconclusive. Coming from Knik, Redington’s Iditarod-crazed training grounds, it could be that she was drawing on memories of the Great Race. The sport’s history is full of such stories. Emmitt Peters, an Athabaskan musher from Ruby, had a revealing experience in his first Iditarod. His leader, Nugget, kept stopping the team in odd places along the trail. The musher didn’t know what to think when the lead dog ignored a village checkpoint and confidently steered the team to a stranger’s house. Then a local woman mentioned that the dog had slept in that same spot before, the year Nugget guided Carl Huntington’s team to victory. Peters realized that the leader’s puzzling pauses were nothing but familiar rest stops. With Nugget’s help, the rookie went on to win that Iditarod, a feat that earned Peters the nickname Yukon Fox.
Then again, Rainy might be sniffing out a mountain-goat path, leading us toward a cliff. There was no way to know.
This had to be Harley’s first trip. Minto, the big dog’s village, boasted champion sprint mushers, but no one that I knew of from the village had ever attempted this trail. Harley supplied the engine that night, but Rainy held the steering wheel. I wondered how far I dared trust the little lesbian.
I was glad when Ace finally caught up. With my team leading, we continued for about another hour, until the veteran, too, had doubts.
“We should have found that shelter by now,” he said.
Bowing to the elements, we hastily made camp. The dogs immediately pawed cozy niches in the snow. I staggered up the gang line, plowing through waist-deep powder, and tossed each dog a chunk of beef and a six-inch piece of Kobuk sausage fat. Not much of a meal, but it was too windy to fire up the cooker, and the dogs needed something. Right now, navigation was the problem. There was no telling what this storm might bring. Or how long this forced shutdown might last.
I flipped my sled on its side, dumping the contents. I’d packed everything in stuff bags with just this sort of emergency in mind. Placing the sled upright, I stripped off my snowmachine suit, shook it off, and stretched it across the bottom of the toboggan for insulation. Next, I unpacked my sleeping bag — a Tangerine Dream expedition-quality bag from North Face, supposedly warm to 40 below zero — and laid it across the suit. Kicking off my bunny boots, I slipped into the sleeping bag. Sitting with my back to the stanchions supporting the handlebar, I took off my headlamp and clipped it to an inside pocket, angling the beam to light the sled’s interior. Almost done now, I grabbed the open flap of the sled bag and pulled it overhead. Then I pressed the Velcro strips together and sealed myself inside. My sled bag had become a survival cocoon.
Wedged inside the tight shelter, I congratulated myself for buying sledmaker Tim White’s extra-long-model Iditarod toboggan. The situation would be far, far worse, I told myself, if I had skimped and bought White’s standard sled, which was six inches shorter. Focusing on the small triumph was more comforting than dwelling on the big picture.
At the beginning of the race, two scenarios scared me: falling through ice into open water on a cold night, or getting nailed by a storm in an exposed section of the trail. I wasn’t even a quarter of the way to Nome and already I felt like a lamb tied to the dark gods’ altar.
Living on the Lower East Side, the biggest threat from the environment had been being mugged. I always left the cab garage on Ninth Avenue with a camera bag slung over my shoulder, and $75 to $100 cash tucked in my right sock. I worked too hard to stuff $8 in another cabbie’s pocket. Instead I caught the subway at Times Square, which was still a lively place at five o’clock in the morning.
Over time, I grew careless. Trains were few, and long delays were common at that time of the morning. I began to stray farther and farther from the protected area near the token booth, seeking more comfortable places to sit, with better light for reading the newspaper. My favorite spot became the fourth or fifth step of an unused staircase at the far end of the lower subway platform. The staircase led to a closed section of the station. The top of the stairs was sealed by a fence.
One morning, a voice intruded on my reading.
“You know it’s not very safe here,” said a young black man, standing so close I could have reached out and touched the gold chains around his neck. He smiled, introduced himself as “The King,” and welcomed me to his dominion.
Two of his friends quietly approached from opposite sides of the platform as the King and I bantered. I calmly stood up and stretched, taking stock of the situation. The platform ahead of me was empty. Standing on the staircase I had the advantage of height. But I was also cornered by the hand rails and the fence behind me.
“What’s in the bag?” The King said, pointing at my camera bag. The bag contained three Olympus 35-mm camera bodies, several lenses, and a powerful flash — my entire life, or so it seemed at the time.
Instead of answering the King, I smiled. Not because I saw a way out. I smiled because I was an idiot, because my back was to the wall in the confrontation every city dweller fears, because there was no avoiding any fate, and because, mainly because, surrender wasn’t an option.
The King and his friends sauntered away.
My breath was loud inside the sled bag. So was the ticking of my watch. The wind was a divine fist, rocking my sled with each blow. Each gust sent tiny jets of snow through gaps in the Velcro. Illuminated by my headlamp, snow crystals rained down on my sleeping bag in shimmering streams. I pried the Velcro strips apart and squeezed them together more carefully, shoring up my defenses.
Madden had talked me into buying a dozen packets of processed salmon. He swore that it would taste like candy on the trail. And the salmon is so oily that it remains soft enough to eat, regardless of the temperature.
Two packets of the salmon were stowed in the sled bag’s inside pocket. I dug one out and cut it open with my folding Buck knife. The fish was cold and stiff, but it crumbled easily into bite-sized bits. I chewed slowly, savoring the intense flavor. Then I licked the greasy wrapper clean. Madman knew what he was talking about.
Carefully opening the sled bag, I checked the dogs. Those I could see were curled in tight balls, mostly covered with blankets of snow. Resealing the cocoon, I dug my toes into the sleeping bag and wiggled inside. Then I switched off the headlamp and huddled in the dark, listening to the wind.
Strange to say, I felt peaceful stuck on top of Rainy Pass. There was no escape. I was again cornered. So what? I wasn’t beaten. And I wasn’t close to surrendering. This was a delay. Nothing more. For the first time in weeks, there were no decisions to make, and no schedules to keep. The storm had me in its grip, and all I could do was ride it out.
Iditarod’s leader was furious.
Instead of taking his 24-hour layover in Rohn, Nikolai, or McGrath, where the other front-runners halted, Terry Adkins kept his dogs on the march, gambling on his mountain-conditioned dogs’ ability to grab an insurmountable lead. The veteran’s strategy hinged on two factors, both of which were beyond his control. To delay the pursuit, he needed a storm, preferably on the 90-mile trail to Iditarod, the ghost town that gave the race its name. He also needed the support of Iditarod’s trailbreakers, the volunteer snowmachiners who open the lead musher’s trail. The timing of their work was crucial. If the snowmachines got too far in front, their work could vanish in drifts. If they weren’t far enough ahead, the trail might not “set,” or harden, in time for the lead musher’s passage.
Adkins got his storm, but the trailbreakers were running too far ahead. He battled drifts in the final miles leading to Ophir. Continuing on alone was out of the question. He filed an official protest with race officials. He angrily told reporters that he might even scratch. The mushing Montanan, with more Iditarods under his belt than anyone else, vowed to make this race his last.
“It’s like living with a woman for 17 years and finding out she’s unfaithful,” Adkins told the Anchorage Daily News.
The complaints and threats were meaningless. Adkins knew it. Words weren’t going to part the white sea blocking the race leader’s trail.
When I poked my head out of the dark cocoon, the sky was clear, and the terrain was nothing like I expected. Ace and I were not, as I had thought, camped on a downward slope. Our teams rested in a flat, exposed bowl.
Ace could hardly believe his eyes. The survival shelter stood a few hundred yards away. I was more surprised when I looked at my watch. Nine hours had passed!
The dogs, and the gear I’d tossed out, were cemented around the sled in white mounds. There was no trace of a trail. But the route ahead was clearly defined by a line of fluorescent orange strips waving from bushes in the gentle breeze. I looked up the line of markers to the notch at the end of the bowl, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. The pass.
I turned to Rainy. “You knew right where we were last night. Didn’t you girl?”
She yawned, leisurely stretching and sunning her tight white belly.
A thin skin of snow clung to the rocks at the top of the pass. Watching Rainy and Harley scrambled over them, I braced for a wild drop. But the slope was gentle, and I could see my whole team cresting the ridge. It was too cloudy to see much of the valley beyond. Dalzell Gorge was saving her secrets.
It was a grand morning on the Iditarod Trail. A hundred yards from the pass, I stopped the team, throwing my sled on its side for an anchor. Pulling out the pocket camera I wore around my neck, I shot pictures of Ace descending the mountain.
The gorge was nothing like the icy roller coaster I was warned to expect. The storm had dumped over two feet of new snow. Rainy was swimming in powder deeper than she was tall. Harley’s head wasn’t covered, but he was swimming just the same. Repeatedly he looked back at me, eyes crying out for a rescue. Tough going. The team kept bunching up, tangling every few feet, and breaking through the soft crust into concealed pools of water.
“Those dogs do like to tangle,” said Ace, chuckling as he watched from behind.
Struggling though the deep soup, I thought back to something Mowry had told me on our final test run. We were crossing an open field. Tiny six-inch drifts were on the march, riding the rising wind.
“This is probably worse than anything you’ll see the whole way to Nome,” the Coach shouted. He gestured at jets of snow raking sideweays across the back of his legs. “Compared to this trail, Iditarod is a highway.” In two trips up the Iditarod Trail and one Quest, representing over 3,000 miles of long-distance mushing, Mowry liked to brag that he had never even unpacked his snowshoes. I shook my head as I reached for mine.
I broke trail for an hour or two, gaining perhaps half a mile as I wallowed in powder and sweat. Progress was steady, albeit at a snail’s pace. It was sweet finally hearing the whine of engines echoing from the ridge. It was Medred and Lavrakas. The journalists were traveling to Rohn by snowmachine. Like cavalry to the rescue, they flew past Ace and me, leaving a new trail in their wake.
Two teams, driven by Mark Williams and Tom Cooley, came loping down the gorge behind the snowmachines. My dogs were in snow-plow mode, and a traffic jam developed. Waving Ace and the others by, I stopped my dogs for a snack break.
Our subsequent run through the gorge was exquisite. The new trail provided footing for the dogs yet remained soft as a cushion. Team and sled glided through thickening trees, skirting pools of open water. I was enjoying life when I spied Medred and Lavrakas up ahead, suspiciously perched on a rock. Rounding a curve I confronted the photo opportunity: a narrow icy bridge over an open creek.
There was no dodging this. As my sled skidded sideways on the ice, I flipped it on one runner and steered it by the open water, trotting alongside like a pro.
“You’re the first one to make it,” Medred called out, sounding surprised.
Lee came through an hour later. His sled whipped into the creek, becoming wedged under the bridge. Lavrakas got a shot of Lee grimacing as he stood in the frigid water.
Could have been me. Would have been me if I hadn’t spotted the media stake out.
Covering the race for the Frontiersman, I hadn’t dared visit Rohn. Access to the remote checkpoint, near the junction of the Tatina and South Fork Kuskokwim Rivers, was mostly limited to charter flights, which I couldn’t afford on our budget. If the weather closed in, a person could get trapped for days waiting for a flight out. And that just wouldn’t do at all, because Rohn didn’t even have a phone from which to feed stories back to the office.
In the gold-rush days, miners traveling the Iditarod Trail found a roadhouse waiting in Rohn. Now the only structure standing was a small 1930s-era cabin, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management. It was reserved for race officials and veterinarians. There was a wall tent, equipped with a stove, where mushers could sleep; that was it for services. Rohn’s drawing card was solitude. Off in the spruce forest, away from most reporters and the excitement present in most villages, sled dogs got more rest.
Perhaps a dozen teams were camped at Rohn when I checked in at the cabin at 3:20 P.M. on Wednesday. I immediately declared my 24-hour layover. Over the next few hours, Lee, Daily, Alan Garth, Bill Peele, and, shortly after 8 P.M., Sepp Herrman, mushed into camp. No one remained on the trail behind us.
The mushers tending dog teams bedded in the sheltering spruce here represented Iditarod’s broad spectrum. We had experienced dog drivers such as Ace, Daily, and Herrman — three men who had shared their lives with sled dogs. And we had mushing adventurers like Peele, a 55-year-old pharmaceutical company employee from North Carolina, and Garth, a social worker from England. They were each driving dog teams leased from Old Joe’s huge kennel 90 days or less before the race.
Fetching water from the river with the help of a rickety camp ladder, I served my dogs three hearty meals during our leisurely stay in Rohn. I amassed a huge pile of surplus booties from the camp refuse heap. The checkers also allowed me and the other stragglers to dry personal gear over the cabin’s wood-stove.
On the advice of veterinarian Bob Sept, I gave each dog a foot massage, rubbing ointment into every paw. After 275 miles on the trail, three of my dogs had troublesome cuts or splits in their pads. My sore-footed trio — Screech, Cyrus, and the White Rat — had possessed iron paws during training. Therein lay the cause. They weren’t used to wearing booties and, Cyrus especially, kept pulling them off.
I was really worried about Cyrus. The young dog had stopped pulling on the final miles up to the checkpoint, and he seemed listless, quiet even. It was possible I might have to drop Rattles’s poor puppy.
“Could sore paws alone account for such a personality change?”
You bet, said the vet, who gave me a small vial of ointment for the cuts. I dabbed the goo on those sore paws every few hours, placing booties on afterward to keep the dogs from licking their toes clean.
A time adjustment was factored into each musher’s 24-hour layover. Since I had mushed the first dog team out of Anchorage, my mandatory stop was extended by 2 hours, 43 minutes, which boosted my layover to almost 27 hours. That accounted for the rude surprise I found waiting Thursday morning on the checker’s time sheet. Though I had beat five teams into Rohn, they were all scheduled out ahead of me.
By noon, everyone was scrambling to go, including the checkpoint staff. The musher’s tent disappeared before I took a planned nap. Flames danced over roaring trash barrels as vets and checkers burned everything nonessential. The crackling fires and smoke gave the scene an apocalyptic edge. I was anxious to get moving.
Lee and Garth were the last out before me. As I helped guide Lee’s dogs to the trail, I kidded Barry that he had better push his dogs for all they were worth, because we would be coming at him like a steamroller. He laughed. We both knew my dogs were faster. And I didn’t plan to carry that damn Red Lantern any farther than I absolutely had to.
I was required to stay until 6:03 P.M. It was closer to 6:30 by the time I pulled out of the camp. The checkpoint staff turned out in force and cheered my departure. The last sled in Iditarod’s 70-team field was again on its way.
I had Chad in single lead. He and the other dogs were supercharged by their 27-hour rest. Maybe 200 yards from camp, a bump threw the sled sideways in the air. I landed flat on my chest and got the wind knocked out of me. The team dragged the overturned sled and me about 75 yards, spewing a trail of cassette tapes, brownies, batteries, and juice containers from the rear sled-bag pocket. I finally stopped the dogs in an icy section, which offered little for the snow hook to bite into. I looked longingly at the snacks and tapes scattered behind me. Those cassettes represented tunes carefully selected for the coming run through the Burn. A Miles Davis tape, which I had been saving, lay in the center of the trail, perhaps 7 feet back.
Raven was chirping like a poodle. Spook was baying. Harley and Cyrus were jerking the sled forward, inch by inch.
“Sorry, Miles,” I said.
I shifted my foot, and the brake sprang free. Chad felt the release and leaped at the trail ahead. The team whipped my sled with mad zeal.
I did what I could to hold the dogs to a reasonable pace, but paws were flying as we entered a narrow tunnel in the spruce. The sled glanced off several big trees without incident. Then, with a sharp “crack,” my right rear stanchion nicked a small tree and splintered. The handlebar felt like a limp noodle.
Snow was falling, each flake lengthening the gap between my team and those ahead. I tied the team to a tree and examined the damage. Didn’t look that bad. A few hose clamps should do the trick. In less than 40 minutes, I was back on the trail, aiming to close that gap on Barry Lee.
“Nothing to it,” I thought, pleased with my ingenuity.
The patch job held for about 15 minutes, until I smacked another tree, further busting up the stanchion and a rear support bar.
The light was fading as I chopped down a small tree and lashed it over the stanchion like a splint. The repair job made for sluggish steering. I traveled a few miles before an abrupt dip in the trail sent me nose-diving into the runners. Pieces of my headlamp reflector fell when I lifted my head. The bulb was still burning, but it cast a splotchy light. Looking at my sled, I blinked a few times, unwilling to accept the truth. The splint had held, but now the companion rear stanchion was broken.
“No longer funny, guys,” I said, using a tone that caused the dogs to perk up their ears.
I couldn’t believe it. Snow was pouring down on us. Flakes sizzled on the bare bulb of my crunched headlamp. The next checkpoint, Nikolai, was at least 75 miles away, and I had a broken sled.
First priority was the headlamp. I pieced together shards and formed a crude reflector, which I attached to the bulb bracket with first-aid adhesive tape. The patched reflector threw a fragmented beam, but light of any kind was precious. Then I chopped down another thin tree and fashioned another splint. The overhaul took 90 minutes and turned my sled into something more suited to Fred Flintstone than an Iditarod musher.
Only traces remained of the tracks ahead, but the trail remained obvious through dense groves of spruce and snow-covered tussocks. Navigation got tougher as we entered the Post River Valley, where the trail crossed gravel bars and zigzagged through driftwood piles. “Chad,” I whispered, “you’re following something out here, but where are the markers?”
I heard later that a number of mushers had got lost in the area, including Runyan and Swenson. That might explain why Chad confidently charged down several blind alleys. Trouble was brewing as I turned the team around several times. But I had ground to make up, and Golden Dog was still my fastest leader. I tried to erase the disappointments with quick snacks, but it wasn’t Chad’s night. The third or maybe fourth time I second-guessed his judgment, Chad’s ego crumbled. He buried his head in the snow and refused to budge.
This was no place to argue. Placing Rainy and Harley in lead, I drove the team hard for several hours. I couldn’t detect the trail myself, but we passed enough markers to maintain my confidence in the lesbian. Our luck ran out on the edge of a large lake. Rainy charged into the white expanse, but her clues ended at the shoreline. She swung the team right, then left, searching for a bearing. Then she looked at me, but I couldn’t help. From what little I could see through the white soup, the broad lake’s white surface was seamless and perfect.
Throwing the sled on its side, I halted the team on the snow-covered ice and ran up to Rainy. She shied, as always, but looked at me as I knelt down beside her. “It’s not your fault, little girl,” I whispered. “Not your fault at all.”
Pulling the dogs off the lake, I bedded the team in a clump of bushes. It was snowing again, blowing loose powder anyway. I dug a pit to shield the cooker from the wind. After serving the dogs a hot meal, I emptied my sled for the second time and climbed inside. I slept fitfully, haunted by the knowledge that I was alone — in last place — at least 800 miles from Nome.