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

The musher is Bob Bright; he’s a marathon runner from Chicago who finished the race in 1985. He left late this morning and got seven or eight miles toward Koyuk before he decided something was badly wrong and decided to turn around. If he’d continued he would likely have died of exposure in the increasing wind. Apparently his good judgment saved his own life, and the race organization has him on a plane to the hospital in Nome within a couple of hours.

Later in the afternoon we hear Andy is on his way in. He apparently left right behind us but lost our trail in the drifts. He’s had even a worse time than we did crawling across the wasteland and we are extremely glad to see him. By the time he pulls in the wind is up to 40 miles an hour with higher gusts and the snow is like tiny bullets when it hits exposed skin. Even sheltered behind the armory it’s all we can do to feed the dogs and keep their straw where it will do them some good.

No matter how bad the weather, we can’t bring a dog inside a building, not even a remote shelter cabin. The dog must be dropped and the musher may have to scratch — as happened to Andy last year within sight of Nome. We’re nowhere near that extremity but I doubt the team is getting quality rest in the swirling gusts. I pile more straw around the most exposed dogs and drag some unopened bales over for extra windbreaks.

New Shaktoolik stretches along its single street, sandwiched on a spit between the Bering Sea and a slough of the Shaktoolik River. The massive snow fence behind town offers some protection from the incessant north wind. This area is consistently the windiest on the entire race. The trail to Koyuk exits through a gap in the snow fence.

The only exception to the no-dogs-inside rule is if a vet wants to bring a dog in to work on it. Yankee needs a couple of precautionary stitches as a result of his set-to with Bear and Silvertip last night and the vet decides it would be better to bring him into the armory for a few minutes to do it. It’s the first time I’ve ever had a dog inside a checkpoint and I’m sure it’s a new experience for Yankee, who is strictly an outside dog even back home.

The fun begins when the vet produces his suture needle and 75-pound Yankee, my biggest and arguably my strongest dog, decides he’d rather be in the great outdoors. I’m working to hold him steady but it’s like trying to restrain a rodeo bull. I’m actually more worried I’ll get stitched instead of him as the vet hovers and strikes like a cobra.

The vet, however, seems completely unconcerned and neatly closes the cut in his bobbing target, somehow missing the various parts of my anatomy in close proximity. Once the deed is done Yankee almost demolishes the door on his way out with me hanging on. I don’t think I’ll have to worry about his being pulled from the race because of being inside; I just hope I can get him in the airline kennel to ship him back from Nome.

Late in the afternoon we receive word four drivers who left Shaktoolik early this morning finally straggled into Koyuk after a nine-hour crossing. Three of them — Aaron Burmeister, Rob Carss, and Ararad Khatchikian — had already had a rough 15-hour trip from Unalakleet. They were stuck here in Shaktoolik for 15 more hours waiting for a break in the storm-force winds.

The fourth driver, Dave Branholm, had been here for almost two days after his leaders had a meltdown coming up from Unalakleet. He tried to follow several groups to Koyuk but had to turn back each time. Finally his leaders condescended to follow Aaron’s group and he made it across with them. It was no picnic, with 30-mile-an-hour winds and blowing snow, but they made it. Now they’re out of the wind zone with clear sailing to Nome. They even have a good chance to make it to the banquet on Sunday; we’ll just have to follow when we can.

We remaining exiles decide to get some rest so we can try to leave tonight when the wind is supposed to die down a bit. About seven p.m. I wake up and look outside. The checker walks over and says to go back to sleep because the wind is pushing 60 miles an hour and isn’t forecast to abate until tomorrow morning. I don’t even wake Lisa and Andy; we are pawns of the weather god and may as well make the best of our extended stay here by catching up on sleep.

The wind howls around the armory all evening. We get up and feed the dogs again about midnight and it’s brutal outside. The dogs are doing okay but the wind chill in the open is 110˚ below zero. Despite my best precautions I refreeze the tips of a couple of fingers I froze back in the Klondike 300 in January. Of course, the flash-frozen digits are the only ones still working on my broken hand. Now when I try to pick something up it’s like using chopsticks because the fingertips have no feeling. I wonder to myself if I can apply for some kind of disability when the race is over, because I’m going to have a hard time even signing my name for a month.

March 16—The Iditarod: Shaktoolik to Koyuk (58 miles)

The wind finally begins to die down after sunrise. We’ve enjoyed the local hospitality for more than 20 hours and it’s definitely time to move on. Lisa, Andy, and I are ready to go by mid-morning and we head out of town against a mere 15-mile-an-hour breeze. We cross the slough behind the village and pass through what is locally called the Gate, the only gap in the endless Great Wall which fends off the north wind.

Looking back to Shaktoolik from the trail to Koyuk, the village’s few dozen buildings form a thin line along the ice- bound shore of the Bering Sea. There is not so much as a shrub for 60 miles north across the ice of Norton Bay.

As we move out onto the blinding white expanse beyond the windbreak we must look again like a trio of armor-clad knights sallying from the safety of the shining castle on a great and uncertain crusade — and that’s just about how we feel, given the events of the past few days. Koyuk is 60 miles away and the wind is going to come up again during the afternoon; our crusade today will probably be a long one.

The wind stays mercifully light as we work the 15 miles across the low-lying peninsula behind Shaktoolik to Island Point, a 200-foot rock jutting up from the edge of Norton Bay. We pass the old shelter cabin on the point and shortly drop down a 30-foot embankment to the ice of Norton Bay. Andy is in the lead but his leaders falter as they start out onto the drifted and utterly flat expanse of the sea ice. Lisa’s team balks as well, leaving Socks to be our guide across the void.

The old master doesn’t even hesitate as he trots up the blown-in trail at his usual stately pace into the now-increasing wind. Lisa and Andy fall in line astern as we marshal our oceangoing convoy for the voyage to Koyuk. Although we will be miles from land on salt water, we’re not exactly adrift on the deep sea because we can easily see the hills and mountains which virtually surround the bay. We can clearly make out the low mountain dead ahead under which lies Koyuk, 45 miles distant. At night the red light on a radio tower above town is said to be visible almost from Shaktoolik.

Koyuk is another Malemiut Inupiat village of 100 people which has been here at the mouth of its river since before the Russians. Around the turn of the century it became a major supply point for gold mines on the Seward Peninsula. There was even a coal mine in the area which supplied Nome for many years. Today there aren’t any booms underway and the village residents maintain a largely subsistence lifestyle buttressed by a few jobs, mainly with various government agencies.