Mike Dillingham - Alaska Dogs and Iditarod Mushers - The Adventures of Balto, Back of the Pack, Honor Bound, Rivers

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The Adventures of Balto: The Untold Story of Alaska’s Famous Iditarod Sled Dog
Back of the Pack: An Iditarod Rookie Musher’s Alaska Pilgrimage to Nome
Rivers: Through the Eyes of a Blind Dog
Honor Bound: The story of an Alaska dog’s journey home, how he fulfilled his honor-bond to his girl, and became a true dog, a great dog

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As I lead Socks back from his beachcombing excursion Lisa and Andy have found the trail leading along the slough which runs behind the dune. It’s already heavily drifted and the wind is picking up. We know we’re only 12 miles from Shaktoolik and decide to push on, taking turns breaking trail up the slough. It is tortuously slow and laborious going, each of us making only 100 yards or so before yielding the point position to give the dogs a rest.

With every yard the wind seems to increase. After a couple of hours of banging through the drifts it is howling from the north at 40 miles an hour or more, creating a vicious ground blizzard which reduces our visibility to 50 yards. If we only had to contend with the wind I have no doubt Socks could get us to Shaktoolik. Teams in the front and middle of the race managed to get through here with winds as bad as we are experiencing. However, with fresh snow to shove around, the wind has obliterated the trail and constructed a virtually impassable jungle of drifts; the darkness compounds the problem.

The slashing gale is inescapable; there is no shelter out here. The slough is completely exposed to the north wind and there are no trees of any consequence. At one point I stop and climb over the barrier dune to see if conditions are any better in its lee, but the beach is choked with drifts and if anything the wind is stronger. And the sea ice is a nightmare of upended floes jammed onshore by south winds earlier in the season.

Finally we come to a particularly nasty series of drifts. The wind is screaming and the driven snow stings our faces when we try to peer up the darkened slough to see the next marker. Socks simply stops and looks back at me. I know it’s time to go back to the cabin we passed and wait this out. Besides, I’m worried the dogs will become hypothermic in the wind and I want to get them sheltered from it as quickly as possible.

Lisa and Andy turn their teams around without difficulty. As I lead Socks back, however, the other dogs anticipate me and begin a retreat from the maelstrom on their own, causing an instant tangle. In the mess, Silvertip and Bear decide to chew on Yankee. I pull them apart and with steadily mounting frustration start to undo the Gordian knot.

I’m cold and tired and my hand is hurting fiercely and I’m finally out of patience. I shout at Lisa for help so we can get moving back to the cabin. In a daze I begin to undo snaps and lines. As Lisa starts to work with me I’m becoming so upset I don’t notice when I inadvertently unhook Yankee’s neckline and tugline and he wanders away from the confusion.

When I realize he is loose I bolt toward him, shouting at Andy to try to intercept him. This only spooks the normally gentle giant, who turns and flees up over the barrier dune toward the sea ice with me chasing clumsily in my heavy gear. I watch in paralyzed horror as Yankee vanishes over the snow-crusted dune in the black, gale-swept night.

The image sears itself into my mind; as long as I drive dogs I know I will never forget it. I am overwhelmed by a wave of total desperation. If I can’t catch Yankee I’m out of the race. Worse, there’s no way he can survive out there on the ice in the piercing wind and cold with no food. Everything has come unglued with frightening swiftness and is spinning out of control. This is my absolute worst nightmare come true, far more terrifying than anything I experienced last year.

I keep plodding after him, hoping he will let me get close enough to capture him. I can only see him when he turns to look at me and my headlamp catches the flickering blue gleam of his frightened eyes. He runs out into the jumbled maze of floes; I stumble after him, shouting. I’m chasing yet another ghost, by far the most important specter of my whole mushing career.

Suddenly I come to my senses and stop. I call Yankee’s name as gently as I can and he turns and looks at me. I kneel down and call him again and he slowly shambles toward me, head down, almost apologetic. When he finally comes up and sniffs my outstretched hand and lets me wrap my arms around him I am almost in tears with relief and affection.

I hug him for what seems a long time in the howling wind and enfolding night and slowly the world comes back into focus. As I lead him back to the team the events of 10 minutes ago are already ancient history. We’ve got work to do, and quickly. We must return to the cabin we passed and get the dogs out of the wind and get warm food into them. We need to get a fire going for ourselves and we must prepare to push on out to Shaktoolik once daylight evens up the odds with the wind.

As I crest the dune Lisa has finished unsnarling my team and I hook Yankee back into his slot. Andy leads the way as we retrace our tracks for what I now see is a very short distance: we worked for three hours and probably didn’t even break a mile of trail through the drifted slough.

We discover the cabin to be an under-construction plywood shack, barely 10 feet square. It has no door and is strewn with lumber and boxes, but it has a wood stove with a ready supply of split wood. As far as we’re concerned, it’s the Hilton and we check in.

The sky is brightening as we bed down the dogs behind whatever windbreaks we can improvise. I use a shovel I find in the cabin to dig holes in a snowdrift for my team and then stick fragments of plywood in front of them to further deflect the insistent wind. We set up our alcohol cookers on the cabin’s tiny porch and pack them with wind-hardened snow for hot water.

As our designated pyrotechnic expert, Lisa gets a fire started in the wood stove. Unfortunately she doesn’t have any more atomic fire logs so she has to do this one the old-fashioned way. We discover the flue has no damper and most of the heat is going up the stack, but the fire still goes a long way to warm up the cabin’s frigid interior.

As I sit semicomatose in front of the stove I realize I’ve become mildly hypothermic myself and spend some extra time inside warming up. I don’t want to think what our situation would be if we’d kept pushing toward Shaktoolik and gotten stalled somewhere in the open.

Within a couple of hours of our decision to turn around the dogs have had a hot meal and are resting. Andy and Lisa and I have decided to wait several more hours to give the dogs — and ourselves — a chance to recover from the long cold night. If Slim and his trail sweeps come back to look for us, we’ll follow their tracks in to Shaktoolik. If not, we’ll resume our trailbreaking efforts later in the morning and punch our way through somehow. We’re not about to be denied our trip to Nome by a little breeze.

About mid-morning we hear the sound of snowmachines above the wind. A few minutes later Slim and his cohorts materialize from the direction of Shaktoolik. They roar to a stop in front of the cabin as we step outside to greet them. It’s as happy a reunion as I’ve seen since Yankee came back last night.

Slim says everyone has been worrying about us since yesterday evening. The wind in Shaktoolik blew 50 miles an hour or more all night and they feared we’d been caught up in the Blueberry Hills and wandered off the trail. The tempest died down somewhat this morning and they headed back to find us.

Their best hope was that we’d stop at this shelter cabin if we got this far. To say they were relieved when they saw smoke coming from the chimney would be an understatement. This has been the kind of unexpected windstorm which kills people in this part of the country. And it’s not over: we need to get moving and on out to Shaktoolik before the wind comes back up this afternoon.

Lisa and I are hooked up and moving in 45 minutes. Andy says he’ll be along shortly. Shortly after we’re back on the slough Lisa and I discover we still don’t have a trail to follow: the snow has already completely drifted over the snowmachine tracks. We hope Andy is moving behind us because it’s getting worse and he runs the risk of getting stuck all over again.

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