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

We’re running on the lagoon side of the spit; this lets the slowly rising sun outline each house in turn as we pass. The warm pinks and golds of the sunrise contrast dramatically with the weathered tints of the buildings and the monochromatic whites and grays of the shadowed snow and sea ice. It’s a continuous series of scenes any photographer would kill for and is another well-earned reward for us; I wish the dogs could appreciate is as much as I do.

The trail between Koyuk and Elim runs along the shore ice in places. Winds can jam ice floes onto the shore in jumbled heaps, or just as easily push them back out to sea, leaving open water.

Once more I bemoan the demise of my pocket camera, which expired a few days into the race. I have only a handful of pictures to document what we’ve been through and I’m sure I’m going to regret it later. On the other hand, I’ve found photographs to be woefully inadequate to capture especially important events; often they are better left untaken. The memory is sometimes a better camera. One thing is for certain: there’s no way I’ll ever forget the incredible flood of images recorded in my mind over the past two weeks.

Past the old village we make a slow five-mile run on a very soft and punchy trail across the lagoon to the abandoned Moses Point FAA station. This is a relic of the pre-World-War-II buildup of Alaska’s aviation network. At one time its 5,000-foot runway, hangars, and terminal building hosted dozens of planes a day enroute to and from Nome. Its cluster of trim government houses was home to a dozen families manning this outpost of modern civilization.

The 9-mile state highway from Moses Point to Elim is left unplowed in the winter. The town of Elim and its new airport are at the foot of the hill. The coast around Elim supports a thick forest, one of the very few wooded areas on the Seward Peninsula.

The airport and its buildings are derelict now; the only sign of activity is a radio beacon in its hermetically sealed blockhouse with its generator softly putt-putting above the rustle of the wind. As a pilot, I find scenes like this depressing; too many airports are closing around the country, even in Alaska where airplanes are vital necessities. But I understand what happened here: when the village moved and a new airport was built adjacent to it there was no longer any justification to keep this one open. In some cases progress has a certain rationality to it.

The remaining nine miles into new Elim are on a state-maintained (but unplowed) road which climbs several hundred feet to skirt the bluffs punctuating the coastline from here to Nome. We roll into the checkpoint late in the morning and discover my old friend Jasper Bond is running things, having transferred here after he finished more than three weeks in the wilderness at Rohn.

As usual he’s got everything well organized, right down to finding a convenient source of hot water. Within half an hour the dogs are fed and resting in the warm sun; this is the first true out-of-the-wind rest they’ve had since the Yukon. We’ll wait out the heat of the afternoon and then push on in time to get over the mountains to Golovin by dark. In the meantime Jasper’s crew has sandwiches and hot soup ready for us inside the spacious state maintenance garage being used as the checkpoint.

Checker Jasper Bond looks over teams at Elim while mushers take a break inside the nearby checkpoint. (Jasper usually works the Rohn checkpoint earlier in the race.)

After a good nap we get ready to leave about mid-afternoon. Jasper and his people are closing up the checkpoint; the plane is already on the way to take them to Nome for this afternoon’s banquet. I jokingly ask Jasper (who resembles a pro football lineman and is known to have a healthy appetite) to save some food for our arrival tomorrow.

We all leave Elim about the same time; the trail runs alongside the airport and we watch the Iditarod Air Force plane take off as we head out of town. Two years ago I was flying the plane that pulled the last volunteers out of Elim for the banquet; I’m certainly getting a different perspective on things today.

Once we’re past the airport, the race route out of Elim this year doesn’t follow the sea ice for the first 10 miles as it usually does. The strange weather this winter has resulted in open water just offshore from here to Nome. Instead, we’re using the old mail trail, an overland detour we heard about a few days ago but which didn’t sound like anything to cause undue worry. It’s a little longer but the villagers have told us it’s quite a beautiful run, so we’re in the cruise mode.

Like everyone else, we consider the main challenge on this leg to be crossing the mountains between the coast and Golovnin Bay. From an abandoned coastal cabin at Walla Walla 10 miles south of Elim, the trail turns inland, to the west. Then it climbs directly up and over a series of 1,000-foot ridges which culminate in Little McKinley, a 1,200-foot summit overlooking the village of Golovin.

Many mushers consider Little McKinley the toughest climb on the race. It’s even worse than Rainy Pass because its succession of brutal climbs probably totals 5,000 feet or more, all within only eight miles, interspersed with steep downhills which don’t give the dogs a chance to recover. Additionally, the weather is often abominable because the entire overland stretch is completely above timberline and exposed to the almost incessant wind.

Little McKinley will be hard work for the dogs, but they’re well rested. In fact, my team is getting stronger and stronger as we work toward Nome. After 1,500 miles of training and 1,000 miles on the Iditarod, the dogs are superbly conditioned and trail-tough and could probably run the remaining 100 miles to Front Street nonstop if I asked them. They’re working as a single coordinated unit and showing the intuitive trail savvy of seasoned Iditarod veterans. I modestly consider the 11 I’ve been running since Kaltag to be the best dog team I’ve ever driven, even if they’re not very fast.

After the first mile out of Elim we decide we shouldn’t have been leaning forward so much to Little McKinley because we’ve got trouble right here in River City. The allegedly innocuous mail trail is turning out to be not your average dog trail: it’s a narrow, roller-coaster, mogul-marred cliff-hanger through heavy forest requiring every ounce of skill and attention we can muster, and then some.

It repeatedly climbs abruptly hundreds of feet to snake along the tops of dizzying bluffs and then plunges down steep tree-choked chutes which threaten to wear out our brakes. Several times I get ambushed by cleverly concealed low-hanging branches that nearly wipe me off the sled. We spend an inordinate amount of time angling along hillsides so steep I don’t even want to look down them.

At one point we run for 50 yards along a ledge not more than three feet wide with a rock wall on the uphill side and a 300-foot drop to the beach on the other. It’s so tight I’m worried if one of the dogs sneezes we’ll become the blue-plate special at Chez Raven down on the rocks below.

This trail is genuinely terrifying. I’m glad I didn’t know about it beforehand or I might have had second thoughts. Dalzell Gorge and the Blueberry Hills were only warm-ups for this monster. I’m profoundly thankful I didn’t waltz blithely into this at night.